User:Heather (WMF)/sandbox
Identity guidelines for Wikipedia
Why is it important to have guidelines?
Wikipedia is a precious, shared resource, used around the world by millions of people every day. We created these guidelines to help authorized re-users of the Wikimedia Foundation’s official marks, including Wikipedia, represent our identity in a way that is consistent with the quality, impact, and importance of our projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation marks represent much of what our projects and our movement stands for: bold ideas, global collaboration, typography and text, integrity and quality. We ask that everyone who has permission to use these marks keep those values in mind. Using these marks well is a serious responsibility.
All of the assets referenced in this guide can be found on the Wikimedia Foundation’s website, at Wikimedia visual identity guidelines
The identity and its elements
About the Wikipedia identity ^
The distinctive Wikipedia identity has evolved over the years since it was introduced in 2003 following a volunteer competition to find a distinctive mark to represent Wikipedia. User Paul Stansifer proposed the original design of the globe in 2003, and shortly afterwards fellow Wikipedian David Friedland made considerable improvements to its styling and puzzle pieces.
Since it was originally introduced, the puzzle globe has undergone a series of small changes — mostly adjustments to correct the choice of other characters representing the first character of the word ‘Wikipedia’ in various languages. At one point the puzzle globe included a Klingon alphabet character. In May 2010, the Wikimedia Foundation introduced a revised version of the Wikipedia puzzle globe that included corrected characters and a mapping of characters on the reverse of the puzzle globe, all based on a full 3D rendering of the puzzle globe object.
The puzzle globe typically accompanies the Wikipedia wordmark, originally set in Hoefler, but recently updated to Linux Libertine, an opensource typeface, to facilitate easier localization of the wordmark in new language editions of the project. Together, we refer to this as the unified mark.
Online, at wikipedia.org, the wordmark always includes a descriptor ‘The Free Encyclopedia,’ which is translated into the language of each project.
You can read more about the history of the marks here
The elements of our identity ^
Over time, we’ve expanded the elements that make up our visual identity.
We began with two simple elements, the puzzle globe and the wordmark, which together constitute the unified mark. Two additional elements, the puzzle icon and the W icon, have been proposed to serve specific situations — including digital implementations and design situations with space constraints.
Each element of the Wikipedia identity has been carefully designed to function both independently and when united, collectively echoing the core identity of Wikipedia.