Marketing Team meeting 2026-09-07
Attendees
Brand Identity Rework
Old
We believe in open-source innovation and a community-driven ethos — values that have shaped our identity from the very beginning.
As you explore this guide, we hope you’ll sense the spirit of stable evolution — a core principle we embrace over stagnation or chaos.
This guide serves as a framework to help ensure that our communication and design consistently reflect the values that define Nix: innovation, reliability, and simplicity.
It brings together creative expression and technical precision to foster a unified identity across all touchpoints.
We’ve aimed to include everything you need to feel confident and comfortable when working with the NixOS visual identity — the public face of our declarative builds and deployments ecosystem.If anything is unclear or you have questions, we’re always happy to help.
Please feel free to reach out to the Marketing Team or the Brand and Design Steward directly. You can find contact information here: Marketing Team | Nix & NixOS
New
- @trespaul: “Precise and accessible”
- @fricklerhandwerk: The Old Website (pre Marketing team early 2020)
- One core sentiment of the community seems to be a strong attention to “essence” as opposed to surface features
- Had the impression that around that time there was a subset of users who were appalled at the candy that was introduced
- @trespaul: What I get from the soft colors and the rounded features–it is not quite corporate style; it comes across as “we want to be approachable”, but it feels patronizing
- We should approach accessibility by respecting our users (whoever is reading or interacting with things) by trusting that if we explain/introduce well, they’re capable to go from there on their own
- In particular we shouldn’t deliberatly hide things to make it appear less complicated than it really is, and then have people be negatively surprised; that’s insulting
- Hiding is not the same as progressive disclosure/introduction!
- Idea: use a brutalist (in the sense of “show the raw”) visual design, to both reflect the sentiment and respect the user (in the sense of, avoid decoration and distractions)
- @fricklerhandwerk: By brutalist visual style, do you mean things like…?
- @djacu: Brand identity should inform what’s on our pages
- @fricklerhandwerk: Content structure problem should be addressed from a UX perspective. What works is to pick an audience and ask, “What will they do?”, and then remove everything that would get in their way. In very small increments of user stories.
- @trespaul: Problems with incrementalism:
- With a blank slate you can make decisions you otherwise couldn’t
- New people have to get familiar with the culture the incremental develompent embodies
- @fricklerhandwerk: Problems with clean slate:
- Conways law: You can’t make groups use the thing you want them to use, unless you serve their needs (which is something very different)
- But that also means you have to maintain it forever
- Redoing something means pulling through from clean slate to “replaces the existing thing well enough”, which is almost always much more time than anyone has available
- Clean slate approaches risk breaking some workflows almost 100%
- And this is not about heating spacebars, but this: the real value is created by maintainers, not beginners. Breaking their workflows loses cohesion and support, and that destroys value in the commons
- Conways law: You can’t make groups use the thing you want them to use, unless you serve their needs (which is something very different)
- (some discussion on how value is created in the ecosystem)
- (also about target audience, re-reading Marketing Team | Nix & NixOS, which is mostly @garbas’ words written down by @fricklerhandwerk)
- @trespaul: It’s actually more general: people with a certain technical mindset
- @fricklerhandwerk: True, but given limited resources it makes sense to focus on a scope that is actionable with what we can implement today
- Teaching new users 2 years worth of university computer science is not something we can afford, unfortunately
- @djacu: For the website we can tailor it to more audiences, since it will likely capture all of them to some extent
- @fricklerhandwerk: This matches with results from the 23.11 UX workshop
- Picking an audience (decision makers) and building out the use case did indeed work exactly as planned, except implementation took quite long for external reasons
- @fricklerhandwerk: This matches with results from the 23.11 UX workshop
- @fricklerhandwerk: True, but given limited resources it makes sense to focus on a scope that is actionable with what we can implement today
- @trespaul: Challenge with picking something to work on: it seems that whatever you want to make smooth, you need to understand the entire system just to make one use case work
- One could of course just do the tweak and ask someone to review it, but then it’s making someone else do the work
We stopped talking and got work done: community: rework the teams cards by djacu · Pull Request #2106 · NixOS/nixos-homepage · GitHub