Book needs a print-ready cover

[semioticrobotic]

I suppose we should develop a cover for this thing! It's a brave, new world now that our branding has changed and we're no longer beholden to prior templates. I can access internal resources (i.e., a Red Hat designer) to help us with this, but want to offer the opportunity to other community members who might be interested in designing a book in our awesome series.

Issue #1 is a blocker for this. We need to finalize a title before we can plaster it on a cover! @LauraHilliger has already written an awesome preface with me, so that's covered.

Please see discussion in #1 to sound off on title suggestions. Otherwise, let's talk covers here.

[LauraHilliger]

was playing around and i liked my concept. A proper designer could help make this better!

[funnelfiasco]

I love the concept!

[semioticrobotic]

Love the concept too. A few thoughts from me:

• If the title were something like Human at a Distance, should the "highlighted" silhouettes be spread throughout the "matrix of people" rather than clustered together, in a pod of four? In other words: Should they be at a distance from one another, but all the same color to indicate that they're connected?
• I think I would prefer a subtitle without a colon in it, because that would lead to some weird conventions when spelling out the book's entire title (Human At a Distance: An Open Organization Guide: Distributed Teamwork).
• With recent books, we've ceased the convention of listing authors' names on the cover, in favor of offering a complete, alphabetical listing inside (see the Guide for Educators, for example). Of course I do not mean to deny @LauraHilliger the recognition she very much deserves for helping this project come alive; I just wanted to note it here.

[trncb]

Great work @LauraHilliger!

• Similar to @semioticrobotic, my first thought was that the highlighted figures should be "distributed" (😉) rather than in a cluster.
• Also, the colon in the subtitle might be a bit much, what about something like An Open Organization Guide To Distributed Teamwork?

[LauraHilliger]

+a million to the distributed people idea, I had it 2 seconds after i posted the images and then lazily did nothing about it.

Ignore my colon (that's none of your business hahahhaha). But seriously, agree, let's get rid of it...after moving a few of the people it looks like:

[LauraHilliger]

maybe we make a bigger team...

[trncb]

@LauraHilliger The distributed team members look better. What does it look like with another 3 team members added to the cover?

Also, the "To" in An Open Organization Guide To Distributed Teamwork. 😉

[tigert]

The big grid of people is nice.

I wonder how it would work if it was somewhat randomly arranged with connecting lines between people, like nodes?

[LauraHilliger]

heya! I've been super busy this week, so I thought I would just upload the Sketch file i made this in in case anyone else had more time to play ;) It's called play.sketch and is in the repo (@semioticrobotic if that's not kosher, please delete as it has, for example, our logo as a build file)

[semioticrobotic]

Cool! Thanks, @LauraHilliger. I see no issue with it. @tigert from @RedHatOfficial has agreed to lend some design help with the project, and I'm glad to see him chiming in here. @tigert, please do feel free to use the sketch file if that's useful to you. I will also send you our brand guidelines and colors under separate cover.

[LauraHilliger]

Added more people, made them all our navy:

[semioticrobotic]

Love the iteration, @LauraHilliger. My preference would be to eliminate the navy icon in the bottom row of icons (just looks cleaner to my eye), but I am not picky. Thanks for this. So cool.