Material and merchandising for Debian events

This page contains a list of all the different merchandising materials people organizing Debian booths can use (so they do not have to make them from scratch):

Posters

Posters really dress up your booth pretty well, so you should take some time and print a few. Also, if you take appropriate precautions, they can be used from time to time at different events. If you do not want to keep them you can always give them away in a BOF (Birds of a Feather) meeting.

Arti Kumria designed the following posters for LinuxExpo Australia, which was held in March of 2000 in Sydney:

The preview PDF files give a good representation of what the poster looks like, except the Debian swirl turns out pink instead of red. It does look good when printed (but be sure and get a printing proof).

The posters above are released into the public domain. If you want to acquire the original data used to create them, please contact Anand Kumria.

For Germany, Joey has a couple of posters he can send to you via yellow post, but only on loan and only for a Debian booth at an exhibition.

For US, Don Armstrong has a set of banners.

Thimo Neubauer also provided a world map with coordinates for Debian developers.

Alexis Younes from 73lab.com designed some pretty nice posters, too. They were available for download on his website [download link unavailable 20200829] . Some printed posters are available in Germany; please ask on the debian-events-eu list.

Flyers and Pamphlets

People like to take things away from the booths, and even if you can't afford to give away more costly things (see below) you can always provide flyers. Flyers have the ability to solve many questions regarding to Debian, can entice people to contribute and for it's paper they can take notes on it! All in all, they are pretty useful.

Sources for a multilingual flyer, as well as instructions for printing are available from the Debian Flyers webpage.

For pamphlets, there are AbiWord files available for both English and Spanish that can be easily translated into any other language as well.

For Europe, Michael Meskes maintains a printed version of bilingual (English and German) flyers made by Debian people during preparations for LinuxTag 2002. Even if your event takes place in a country of which none of the above are native tongues, they will probably help people understand the Debian project and you can always translate them into your own language. These printed flyers may be requested by Michael Meskes.

Demo systems

Of course, setting up a system that runs Debian to make a demo of what the Debian Operating System can do and how to use it is often a very good idea. In order to setup a system all you need is to have a machine available and install Debian in it.

If the system cannot be manned, just set up a nice demo. There's plenty of demos in the Debian archive, Mesa or OpenGL demos can be quite flashy. A screensaver crediting Debian developers can easily be composed by generating a text file with all the members of the project with: grep-available -n -s Maintainer '' | sort -u and then use the FlipText, Fontglide, Noseguy, Phosphor or Starwars screen savers. Alternatively, you can let people browse the Internet using a Debian Desktop.

You can also set up a BabelBox demo, which is slightly more complex but more impressive. The Babelbox demo, developed by Christian Perrier, is a system that takes advantage of the automation capabilities of the Debian Installer to automatically install Debian in a system (optionally) using all the different languages the installer has been translated to, one at a time. Please read the wiki page for all the details on how the system needs to be setup (you need two different machines).

If there is need for hardware, we can send the Debian Events Box to you.

Stickers

One of the things people appreciate most at a booth are stickers. Debian stickers are quite handy because they can be used to put your favorite OS image on laptops, monitors or servers (Note: stickers with transparent background are quite cooler than those with white background).

You can use both the logos (under the conditions outlined) or any of the available stickers. In the subdirectory pages you will find the source for creating a page full of logos which can be useful to print in a normal (color) printer with adhesive paper.

Additionally, the Free Software Foundation has some cool stickers saying GNU protected, GNU & Linux – the dynamic duo and GNU/Linux inside that nobody should miss, really.

Foil stickers

A great thing to use with a booth are stickers. But the majority of them are just printed and often get destroyed by sunlight, water or dirt. A foil label is a glued foil which will be cut into shapes with a special kind of plotter. Thus, there is no white, transparent, or whatever, background at all – just the foil. Therefore, they are great to put on laptops, cars, public boxes at the booth, the booth in general or whatever.

Another advantage is the variable scale. Most possible sizes are from about 3 cm up to 1.20 m varying from the plotter's size.

The stickers can be used to make the booth look better; you can also use smaller ones to give away to visitors, etc.

The stickers are cheap to produce, but their cash value is high, so it's very good to sell them or to give away for donations.

Many different Linux conferences and expositions, including the Debconf, have shown that visitors like them very much and are willing to give a donation.

You can get additional information, samples and files in the stickers directory, for example you can print a single page with many different stickers in foil. For this you can use the single page printout.

Debian business cards for developers

Since the people (developers or not) who dedicate quite some time to Debian from their spare time it is nice to prepare a gift for them. A Debian business card is a cool thing to show and fills the people who own one with some sort of pride!

Also, people who are in charge of organizing events and booths and get in touch with many other project leaders and coordinators during social events can exchange their business cards. Giving out business cards with the Debian logo contributes to Debian's image and is useful for handing out important information that you usually have to scribble down on paper (such as email address, your OpenPGP key fingerprint...).

There is a prototype for business cards which you can use. Customizing it is easy since you only have to edit the card.tex file with the personal data and simply run latex card.tex. Check out the result.

Slides

If you have to hurriedly hold a talk about “What is the Debian Project?” do not worry. You can retrieve the slides or browse the source for ideas. You can also take look at the list of talks given by various people which cover Debian or some aspects of the project. Joey also set up a general framework for a Debian related talk that you may want to base your talk upon.

There are also some nice background images available that you can use to enhance your slides, for example this fancy Debian Gel Logo by Patrick McFarland. If you know of more suitable images, let us know.

T-shirts

T-shirts are quite costly to do, but are quite good gifts for people who help out in the booth or to the organization of the event (if they are really that helpful). You can take a look at some graphics used for t-shirts.

If you want to convert your booth into a merchandise selling enterprise you can (if the event allows that) try selling T-shirts. There are a number of shops on the merchandise page with whom you can cooperate. If you need more ideas you can ask on the relevant events mailinglist or, if that is not fruitful, events@debian.org.

CD-ROMS

If you buy blank CDs in order to do a CDROM giveaway you might want to spend a little more money and burn some CDs, do not forget and try to make them look nicer than a blank CD-ROM disk (use artwork for this). The main source for information for Debian CD-ROMs are the Debian CD pages which detail the process to download. Please take all required actions to stay in compliance with the corresponding license of the software.

Other Sources

A good source of ideas and images for use in Debian merchandising is http://gnuart.onshore.com/.

Other printable advertising material like the Reference Card or the Debian cheat cube is available at the Print Advertising wiki page.

Note: Some of the sources (like flyers, pamphlets or slides) may have become out of date since they were prepared. If you use them for a new event be sure to check that the information is up-to-date and update them if needed. If you do so, please submit the changes by sending a bug to debian-www or by sending a mail to events@debian.org.

Credits

The material described and linked here has been contributed by many people who should be thanked, since it makes other people's lives easier. Thanks should go to