NLnet Gives KOffice a New Logo and Sponsors ODF development

The Dutch NLnet foundation aims to financially support organisations and people that contribute to an open information society. Some time ago they decided to help KOffice in two exciting ways: to sponsor the design of a new logo for KOffice, with matching logo designs for all KOffice applications, and to sponsor Girish Ramakrishnan to improve the ODF support in KWord 2.0. The KOffice team is deeply grateful to NLnet for this support!

Girish Ramakrishnan, a former Trolltech employee, has already started on implementing a thorough test suite for ODF text loading. Helping him are Thomas Zander and Thorsten Zachmann, two old-time members of the KOffice team. In his own words:

“I am working on getting ODF support up to speed in KWord, my work being sponsored by NLNet. As the first step, I have spent my time now automating the ODF testsuite at the OpenDocument Fellowship….

“So far, I have found some basic tests are failing - loading of lists, possibly superfluous spaces/blocks. I have patches coming up.”

KOffice has done without a real logo forever: we used to use the application icon of KOShell, a rainbow, but that was hardly a real logo, and besides, everybody, including the primary school your correspondent attended, uses a rainbow. But coming up with a good logo is hard, and we postponed and postponed the task.

But then NLnet proposed to retain the services of designer Michiel van Kleef of 30 Media. Michiel was faced with a very hard brief: to design a logo, not an icon, for KOffice which combines business and creativity in one, integrated package. After consultation with the KOffice team we arrived at the following logo:

This great design suggested to Michiel the possibility of doing variations on it for the individual applications that KOffice consists of. While KOffice itself has got the KDE color blue, the business applications get orange:

And the graphical applications get purple (and it’s good to see that Karbon2 opens the official SVG sources correctly):

KPlato, the project planner application that is coming along amazingly well for KOffice 2.0 is the odd one out, and gets red:

The helper applications KChart and KFormula are green:

There is also a logo for Kugar, the report writing component in KOffice 1, which will probably be replaced by Adam Pigg’s promising new report component in KOffice 2: