Crafting and maintaining a consistent style is essential to establishing and promoting an organization’s brand. 

As with any organization, Creative Commons’ (CC) brand should help CC build trust with its stakeholders and the broader open movement, as well as maintain and grow CC’s reputation, legitimacy, and leadership in the Global Commons.

With that in mind, we decided to create a CC style guide for CC staff, affiliates, community members, and CC Chapters to use as a reference when creating content specifically for CC as an organization. 

In this guide, you’ll find information on CC’s: 

• Mission and brand tagline
• Mood board
• Brand identity—including information on our logos, fonts, color palette, and visual elements
• Publications style—including guidance on tone, specific language, abbreviations, acronyms, titles and capitalization, numbers, spelling, punctuation, referencing and licensing, and writing tips

Although important, this style guide shouldn’t feel restrictive or diminish creative expression. 

Instead, it should serve as a useful and inspirational guide for anyone creating content specifically for CC as an organization, such as CC staff and members of the CC Global Network. This style guide is also not final and/or comprehensive, it’s the beginning of a longer process to flesh out, define, and standardize CC’s style in order to portray our brand more clearly and consistently. 

Remix this guide for your own use!

We also decided to publish this guide under CC BY and share it externally so that it can be adapted by anyone for their own personal and/or organizational branding needs. If you’re just starting out as a freelance photographer or emerging as an industry thought leader, for example, we encourage you to adapt and remix this guide to build your own! 

We’d love to know how you use this style guide, so tag us on social media when you do!

Download the CC style guide here.

Please note: Our plan is to revisit this guide annually, with our first review taking place in early 2020. Be sure to send us your suggestions for potential changes and/or additions before December 31, 2019 by adding comments to this online document. (Although this is our preferred method for feedback, we will also accept direct emails to victoria@creativecommons.org.) 

The post We Created a CC Style Guide; It’s Yours to Remix appeared first on Creative Commons.

The story of the Creative Commons (CC) logo is linked to the story of CC. 

In 2002, just one year after the founding of CC, designer Ryan Junell accomplished the difficult task of designing a logo that is distinctive, yet teaches through its design. Over time, the CC logo has become a recognizable symbol of the open movement, even accepted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a permanent addition in 2015.

Once the logo was designed, however, it was difficult for Junell to decide on the font for the rest of the CC mark. Generally speaking, designers make their choice on typography based on readability and distinctiveness. Sans typographies, for instance, are considered a standard basic element because of their clean shape and lack of ornaments, keeping the writing structure intact. That allows the text to be combined with other visual elements without competing on information hierarchy or expression. In a way, sans typographies provide both a neutral and an eloquent voice. Junell probably had that in mind when he selected the elegant Akzidenz Grotesk font (designed in 1898!) for the CC logo. 

Since 2002, CC licenses—and the CC logo—have been used to share and make freely available billions of works in the Global Commons. CC has also grown to include an active Global Network, consisting of 41 local CC Chapters and over 450 members who use the logo to support their work. 

Due to this growth, we realized in 2018 that the original Akzidenz Grotesk font was not ideal for members of our Global Network to adapt and remix. We wondered: Can we develop an open-licensed Creative Commons font? Thanks to the kind support of a CC member, we did. 

Today, we’re happy to introduce—and make freely available—CC Accidenz Commons.

CC Accidenz Commons was designed by Archetypo, a research and type design collective based in Germany and Chile. Archetypo designed the font under these basic premises:

1. To establish a quality framework for a typeface based on the original design of Akzidenz Grotesk
2. To improve the original canonic design that precedes Helvetica and optimize it for better Webfont visualizing 
3. To design a versatile text weight to be used in CC’s identity and logo, as well as in headlines, presentations, and other text applications

“We wanted a new Akzidenz version with less contemporary expression,” Archetypo explained, “[while] trying to remain close with the original metal carving of the font.” This meant:

• Re-drawing the original Akzidenz Grotesk font, using different wide and long proportions. In the process, we considered the use of low caps and relative weight for better visualization in text applications.
• Including small openings in the blank space of a sign where elements connect, such as on top of the “n” and at the bottom of the “a.”
• Re-drawing many of the  curves, unifying lower and upper cases.

The end result was CC Accidenz Commons: a contemporary, versatile, and neutral version of Akzidenz Grotesk. Download the font here, and start remixing!

The post Introducing CC Accidenz Commons: An Open-Licensed Font appeared first on Creative Commons.

As part of the drafting committee, Creative Commons (CC) fully supports the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER), which the member states will vote on at the 40th session of the UNESCO General Conference in November. We laud the multitude of national governments and open education experts engaged in the development of this international agreement. We look forward to collaborating with these governments and our NGO colleagues in the coming months and years to help Ministries/Departments of Education implement this Recommendation. 

The UNESCO Recommendation on OER* sets out a transformative vision of open education, contributing to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

Below are the five objectives from the draft Recommendation. You can also view the entire document here.

1. Capacity building: developing the capacity of all key education stakeholders to create, access, use, adapt, and redistribute OER, as well as to use and apply open licenses in a manner consistent with national copyright legislation and international obligations;

2. Developing supportive policy: encouraging governments, and education authorities and institutions to adopt regulatory frameworks to support open licensing of publicly funded educational materials, develop strategies to enable use and adaptation of OER in support of high quality, inclusive education and lifelong learning for all, and adopt integrated mechanisms to recognize the learning outcomes of OER-based programmes of study;

3. Effective inclusive and equitable access to quality OER: supporting the adoption of strategies and programmes, including through relevant technology solutions that ensure OER in any medium are shared in open formats and standards to maximize equitable access, co-creation, curation, and search ability, including for those from vulnerable groups and persons with disabilities;

4. Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER: supporting and encouraging the creation of sustainability models for OER at national and institutional levels, and the planning and pilot test of new sustainable forms of education and learning;

5. Facilitating international cooperation: supporting international cooperation between stakeholders to minimize unnecessary duplication in OER development investments and to develop a global pool of culturally diverse, locally relevant, gender-sensitive, accessible, educational materials in multiple languages.

Here’s a brief timeline of the efforts leading up to the UNESCO Recommendation on OER and CC’s continued engagement:

• 2019: Member states and observer organizations, including Creative Commons, provided multiple edits to the Recommendation draft including an improved open license definition; calling on member states to support the linguistic translation of open licenses; adopting high standards for privacy in OER, platforms, and services; and a call to facilitate open procurement.
• 2017: The 2nd World Congress unanimously adopted the 2017 Ljubljana OER Action Plan. The Congress hosted 30 ministers of education and participants from over 100 countries, with the goal of mainstreaming open education to meet the education targets in the United Nations SDG4.
• 2015: UNESCO announced a new Open Access Repository making more than 300 digital reports, books, and articles available to the world under CC licenses, in line with the 2013 UNESCO Open Access Policy.
• 2012: The groundwork for the current OER Recommendation was laid in the 2012 Paris OER Declaration.

In partnership with our open education colleagues, CC will provide a suite of professional development, policy, networking, and consulting services to national governments as they engage in national and regional efforts to implement the UNESCO OER Recommendation in 2020. Stay tuned!

 

The post We Support the UNESCO Recommendation on OER appeared first on Creative Commons.

The 2020 Creative Commons (CC) Global Summit is returning to Lisbon, Portugal on 14-16 May!

We’ve grown the CC Global Summit every year as hundreds of leading activists, advocates, librarians, educators, lawyers, technologists, and more have joined us for discussion, debate, workshops, planning, talks, and community building.

Whether you’re new to the community or a long-time contributor, the CC Global Summit has lots to offer. It’s a can’t-miss event for anyone interested in the global movement for the commons.

Your Participant Pass includes:

• Access to all conference programming including workshops, talks, and keynotes
• Breakfast, lunch, and snacks served onsite every day
• Evening events showcasing local Lisbon artists

Register today using the discount code: SEEYOUSOON20 for 10% off your registration!

For the latest updates on the 2020 CC Summit, please join our mailing list and check out our website!

Missed last year’s CC Summit? Be sure to check out this blog wrap-up and watch all seven of the keynotes that cover a range of important topics—from decolonizing archives in Palestine to the barriers of copyright reform in Europe.

The post Early Bird Registration is Open for the CC Global Summit! appeared first on Creative Commons.

The 2020 Creative Commons (CC) Global Summit is returning to Lisbon, Portugal on 14-16 May, co-hosted by CC Portugal.

You can help bring the CC Summit to life for our participants by volunteering for a role on one of our planning committees. Please note: These are remote positions; you do not need to be located in Portugal.

Volunteer opportunities available:

Program Committee—as a part of this committee, you’ll work collaboratively to develop the theme and tracks of the CC Global Summit, as well as curate the program submissions. This committee will require weekly or-biweekly conference calls from November 2019 to March 2020, as well as asynchronous communication by email and in Slack.

Scholarship Evaluation Committee—as a part of this committee, made up of CC staff and members, you’ll use funding guidelines provided by CC to evaluate scholarship applications. This committee will require around 3-5 hours per week, from November 2019 until February 2020.

Learn more and apply by November 1, 2019.

Missed last year’s CC Summit? Be sure to check out this blog wrap-up and watch all seven of the keynotes that cover a range of important topics—from decolonizing archives in Palestine to the barriers of copyright reform in Europe.

The post How to Get Involved With the 2020 CC Global Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.