Events, promotional material, swag etc.

[Majken Connor]

Hi all,

I wanted to start a discussion about promoting events or projects,
especially to do with imagery, related to branding etc.

In my personal case I have some recurring events I'm trying to run out of
the Toronto office. I know the Mozilla wordmark should be leveraged in the
advertising and swag. At the same time, I think we know that when promoting
something, we need some eye catching imagery, fancy wordsmithing etc to
capture the viewer's attention, and create interest.

I want to discuss and get a better grasp on the opinions of when custom
imagery should be used, what it should consist of, how should it relate to
use of regular Mozilla logos. How to tie in the event/project specific
images to have some cohesiveness and call back to the static branding.

For example, I love the team specific logos, like Grow Mozilla, Webmaker,
Reps, that have tight relations to each other, the same colours, they use
the Mozilla M (this is more loose in the Reps logo). I personally would
gravitate towards using the M to tie in, but maybe that's only meant for
high level projects?

Take for example the NASA Space Apps Challenge coming up. It would be great
for Mozilla participants to wear the same tshirt, to help show Mozilla's
presence. It's also my personal opinion that it would be a bit boring, and
maybe feel self-serving to just wear Firefox t-shirts. I think it would be
cool to have some specific imagery/slogan to use that's specific to the
event. Kind of like how in charity walks I've done, or in say car races you
might see people on the same team wearing the same shirt, but it has event
specific stuff on it, maybe the sponsors, and the event date. This also
gives it the dual purpose as a keepsake. I know lots of people like
collecting Mozilla shirts (and other tshirts for that matter) and
especially stickers.

That's on the very event specific end. Then you have more reusable things
like logos for local communities.

So I'm wondering if there are already best practices identified in these
areas, what people's thoughts are - is event specific swag a selling point
or does it dilute efforts (or does featuring the wordmark along side the
custom images solve that problem? or some other cohesive element like the
dinohead in the past). I know I'm in a so far unique position in that my
local community is tied to a Mozilla office, so maybe this stuff hasn't
been thought of much yet.

Guidance and discussion appreciated!
-Kensie