Define visual tone/brand of the Seven theme

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/
http://design.canonical.com/the-toolkit/ubuntu-brand-guidelines/
http://drupal.org/node/1164620
http://www.kmsm.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/gvl3_styleguide_v1.pdf

http://www.d7ux.org/how-does-drupal-talk-on-brand-personality-tone-of-vo...

Comment #12

webchick said at 10:16 pm on March 26th, 2009:
One could actually argue that Drupal’s goal is to impose *no* personality on its users, at least as much as possible. A lot of work has been done since the 5.x release of Drupal to make it fully possible to create a “white label” distribution of Drupal that doesn’t mention Drupal at all in any user-facing text.

If you take a gander through some of the high-profile sites that are using Drupal (http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites), you’ll see a wide mix of sites that are being built with the Drupal platform that only serve to back this up:

http://community.michaeljackson.com/: Fun, social, classic
http://recovery.gov/: Solemn, serious, ambitious
http://www.symantec.com/community: Corporate, sales, support
http://ketnet.be/: Fun, vibrant, kids

Just as Leisa didn’t appreciate Joomla! basically creating an advertisement for itself as the default user experience, so too does someone like Amnesty International not want to have to theme out “Hey, bubba! Why dontcha log in thar now?” when they are focused on highlighting human rights crises.

So I would say it’s probably much better for Drupal to portray a plain, non-descript personality… a “blank canvas” if you will… that site designers can then tweak to add whatever special personality traits that make their site their own.
But to answer your question.

Drupal would be a chameleon/some attractive person whose work you enjoy but can’t ever seem to recall their name/hand-built custom car/carpenter

Comment #61

Is this Drupal the brand including Drupal.org / cultism / cool sites built with it, or the branding of Drupal the thing you download? I don’t think they’re at all the same thing.
Answers are for core specifically since I think that’s what you want:
What it is now:
Animal: owl (hat tip yoroy)
Celebrity: Richard Whitely minus the bad jokes appearing on Just a Minute.
Car: http://fronttoback.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/homer_dreamcar.gif crossed with http://bedrock.deadsquid.com/img/group/flintstonecars/fred_wilma_baby_ca...
Profession: librarian
What I’d like it to be:
Animal: flock of starlings (multi-layered)
Celebrity: Nicholas Cage
Car: Prius (minus the annoying Zach Goldsmith-esque driver)
Profession: heart surgeon

Comment #73

So, I’m only going to answer one of the five questions, but I’ll make up for it with an extra-long answer
I noticed that you’re using VW.com as the starting point for some of
your concepting sketches, and as a Jetta owner, it struck me that the Volkswagen brand echoes many of the same values that I think Drupal aspires to.
Volkswagen is literally “the people’s car”, and with its vibrant community and open source mission, Drupal is unquestionably “the people’s CMS”.
Volkswagen cars used to be symbols of the counterculture, but are now accepted as mainstream, just as Drupal started as a hobbyist project, but now runs many enterprise-level sites.
Drupal is also like a Volkswagen in that it’s usually pretty reliable, but when something does go wrong with it, you have to take it to a specialist, because it’s full of strange European-engineered parts
In terms of user experience, I believe that Volkswagen sets a great standard, and is one that Drupal should aspire to.
The thing that I love most about my Jetta is that when I get into it, whether I’m a passenger or a driver, everything feels like it’s in the right place, and I don’t have to guess where individual knobs or
controls are at, or what they do.
On the other hand, the controls on my other car, a Toyota Prius, are sometimes non-intuitive in their placement and operation (have you seen the goofy gear shift they have?), and the car is less enjoyable to drive, even though it’s much newer and has more technological amenities.
Drupal to me feels like it wants to be a Jetta, but is more often a Prius: full of cutting-edge technology, but with a lot of its basic controls in weird places.
If the experience of working with a Drupal site was more like the experience of driving a Jetta, I think we’d have a lot more happy users

To split of the more factual parts, we can already start inventorizing and thinking about #1862442: Document forms, colors, proportions, typography. This isssue is now scoped only on the tone/brand focus.