New Logo Contest

Below you find the announcement of the logo contest we held in autumn 2006. The final logo has meanwhile be selected and is in actual use. For a list of submissions (some are really great) and sponsors, please point your browser to logo-contest.gnupg.org.

After 8 years the time has come to modernize the GnuPG Logo and to work on a new layout of the website.

We appreciate Thomas Löffelholz's Gnus-guarding-the-door logo which has served us for a long time. However, GnuPG has moved forward and is not anymore a plain OpenPGP application but features other protocols as well (S/MIME and partly Secure Shell). Further, the current logo is too detailed to be used as an icon or to be printed on a t-shirt. Thus we want to have a new modern logo.

To get to such a logo we try something new: We ask you to donate to the logo contest and then offer the collected funds to the winner of that contest.

Here are the rules for the contest:

• Submissions should be send by mail to logo-contest at gnupg dot org. Sending just an URL is recommended. At least one PNG scaled to 300 pixel height or width is required. Sending a design concept is appreciated.
• The design should convey the message of freedom and privacy. It must not exploit or offend anyone's sex, race or religion, be obscene or propagate violence.
• The logo shall be available in a free format (bitmap or vector) and eventually made available in source form, modifiable using Free Software (xcf, fig, etc.). The submitter's name and snail mail address is required for exchanging legal papers.
• The winning submitter must agree to assign the copyright to the FSF and attach no other restrictions to the use of the logo. All submitters must declare that they do not infringe the rights of another party and that publishing their logos for the purpose of this contest is acceptable.
• The contest ran until October 31, 2006. A jury will then select the winning submission. The winner will receive 50% of the collected funds. The three top rated submitters are eligible for a gnupg dot org mail alias.
• All contributors to GnuPG who signed a copyright assignment with the FSF, actually provided code or translations and do not participate in the contest make up the jury to decide on the new logo. The file AUTHORS in the GnuPG 1.4.5 tarball has a list of these folks. Simple majority is used to decide.

Collecting and spending the donations:

• The donations are collected for the purpose of creating a logo and a new website layout.
• The winner of the logo contest will receive 50% of the collected funds. The leftover funds will be used for a follow-up contest to redesign and re-implement the website.
• A list of sponsors will be published after the final logo has been selected.
• In case that for unforeseeable reasons a winner could not be determined or we cannot spend the collected funds, they will be donated to the Free Software Foundation Europe.
• The funds are collected through Paypal online payment. For legal reasons and ease of setup they will be collected by g10 Code GmbH, a company headed by GnuPG's principal author Werner Koch. Note, that the tax office will likely require to transfer a 16% VAT, thus the collected funds need to be reduced by this amount. g10 Code will do a weekly report on the received funds as well as a final report after selection of the winner.

Funds collected as of 2006-12-01: 215 Euro
Submissions received: 31
Remaining funds: 107 Euro

The submissions are published since November 1, 2006 at logo-contest.gnupg.org.