Magenta is the new blue - Rebranding Fedora

As the recent Ubuntu rebranding made a lot of headlines and spread the distro's popularity even more, we decided to follow in their steps once again, trying to consolidate Fedora's image as the New Ubuntu in our recently discovered quest for users and market share.

In order to make the rebranding happen, it was necessary a huge flamewar inside the Design Team, with two large camps: one, lead by Máirín, argued for strawberry-pink, trying to reach the female users and developers, a huge potential pool not tapped yet by any other competing distro, and another, championed by Nicu argued for pitch-black with a tint of phosphoric green, appealing to old-fashioned hacker wannabes, as the core of Fedora.

The dispute was settled with a middle ground by a panel of usability experts from outside of the FLOSS world, to have a view from the target we are trying to expand into. The result is magenta, as the new color we are going to, something in-between ping and black, trying to make everyone content. So instead of the old dark blue we will be using a dark magenta, with the hex-code #731473 and instead of the old blue we will use a light magenta, with the hex-code #d801d8

The workdmark will retain the same shape, the small case "fedora" text in the same Bryant 2 font face, just colored in the light magenta color(#d801d8)


Together with a change of colors, a message change is mandatory and magenta is usually associated trough the history of art with religion and royalty. Controversy is good for increasing the public awareness, but controversy from religion may be a bit too unhealthy for an international project so we chose the royalty angle, positioning now Fedora as "The King of Linux".

The new positioning must be reflected in the logo treatment, so we managed to finally receive blessing from our main corporate sponsor Red Hat and include a piece of headwear in the logo in the form of a crown (still, not techincally a hat or a fedora). But to keep the distinction from RHEL, this logo version is going to be used exclusively in non-profit projects. For the other cases, there is a version of the logo with a background textured with medieval French lilies.


The complete logo is the combination of the light magenta wordmark and the textured formal logo:


This change is effective immediately, packages propagating the change are already built in Koji and will reach all the users of the development versions of Fedora at the next push. After the packages get delivered into the channels, the logo and logo usage guidelines will be updated to reflect the change.