Branding guidelines

“The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.” ~Pierre Bonnard

This document outlines the rationale behind and expected use of branding related to this project.

Name

Everything is called something. This project is called: PDS Interop.

This stand for “Personal Data Store Interoperability”

When coding

This project is technical by nature, because of this, our name will appear inside code. When this happens, use “Pdsinterop”, as one word.

A separator must not be used.

All letters except the “P” must be lower-case. The “P” may be either lower- or upper-case (depending on which is more appropriate in the context where it appears).

For instance:

• 🎉 Good
  • pdsinterop
  • Pdsinterop
• 💩 Bad
  • PdsInterop (The I should be lowercase)
  • PDSInterop (All letters except the “P” must be lowercase)
  • pds-interop (A separator must not be used)
  • pds_interop (A separator must not be used)

When writing

When writing about this project, use “PDS Interop” as two words.

The “PDS” part must be all capitals. There must not be any separators between the letters.

“Interop” must be capitalized.

A separator other than the one space between both words must not be used.

For instance:

• 🎉 Good
  • PDS Interop
• 💩 Bad
  • Pds Interop (The “PDS” part must be all capitals)
  • P.D.S. interop (There must not be any separators between the letters)
  • PDS interop (“Interop” must be capitalized)
  • PDS Inter-op (the dash separator is incorrect)
  • Pds-Interop (The separator should be a space, not a dash)
  • PDSInterop (Should be two words, space is missing)
  • PdsInterop (Should be two words, the casing is incorrect)

Rational

The reasoning behind these choices is two-fold.

First of all, as “Personal Data Store Interoperability” is quite a mouthful, using an abbreviation seemed more appropriate. For normal writing contexts, this is sufficient.

The second part: contexts where spaces are not available.

Besides in code, there are other places where a space can not be used in a name. Either because of technical limitations (for instance in a domain name) or because it is not supported (for instance on Twitter).

Between all of these contexts, it differs greatly what can be used instead of a space. Sometimes this is a dash - (for URLs), other times an underscore _ (in PHP code), or a dot . (in Javascript).

To avoid having our name written in a bunch of different ways, we opted for consistency by simply removing the separator.

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