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Re/De-branding the lessons

Overview

Teaching: 0 min
Exercises: 0 min
Questions

  • Is there a way to stop people confusing our own lessons with official Software Carpentry material?

  • Is there a way in which we can give Software Carpentry credit where it’s due?

Objectives

  • Become aware of how to modify the Lesson styles template so that it contains your own branding

  • Become aware of how to modify the Lesson styles template so that it contains your own branding

With the various Carpentries gaining a lot of exposure as a way to get the basics of research practice, indeed good research practice, across, some people would like to give unofficial lessons, but do so in way that doesn’t imply that the lessons are official whilst having the students taking their lessons do so in an environment that they will have become comfortable with, as a result of previously taking official Software/Data/Library Carpentry lessons, or in an environment that prepares them for what they will come across should they take official Software/Data/Library Carpentry lessons.

Similarly, some people would like to, or may be under pressure from other people to, ensure that their brand is “put out there” for the world to see.

Along with its distinctive style, the two places where students taking official Software/Data/Library Carpentry material are reminded of the fact that the lesson is “official’ are the logo in the main menu bar, and the Copyright statement in the footer.

In this episode, we’ll look at a couple of small changes we can make to the current Lesson styles template that allows us to present both our own branding on a lesson whilst ensuring that the Software/Data/Library Carpentries get the credit that they so richly deserve.

Making sure people know it’s a derived work

The easiest change is simply point out that the lesson has been derived from work that is copyright of the relevant Carpentry, and that merely requires the adddition of a string containing the words

Derived from work that is<br/>&nbsp;

to

Rather than remove the area that contains the various logos, we decided to replace each logo with a transparent image that maintains the indentation of the menu items, as they would appear in the official lesson rendering.

The transparent logos should go alongside the official logos

$ ls assets/img/
dc-icon-black.svg  lc-icon-black.svg  swc-logo-blue.png  swc-logo-white.png
lc-icon-black.png  swc-icon-blue.svg  swc-logo-blue.svg  swc-logo-white.svg

and are named

dc-icon-transp.svg lc-icon-transp.svg swc-icon-transp.svg

which allows for a simple change to the filenames in

Adding our own branding

Rather than disrupt the look and feel of the existing lessons, we merely placed our branding into another navigation bar at the top of each page, having again placed the extra image required into the assets\img directory, as this allows for our branding area to collapse in the same way as the main navigational menu.

The additional code is currently placed in the file

and if we follow the naming convention of the CSS class that defines the navigation bar, then we can even re-use the block of CSS code in

to apply a similar style to our extra “branding” bar.

The final modification is to add the URL of our institution as a variable in

so that we can link to it, from underneath our logo, although it’s not clear that one’s institution’s home page is the place that people will want to be taken to.

Key Points

  • Some people would like to give material not covered within the official Software Carpentry syllabus but give it in a way that has the students taking such a lesson using resources in a format that they will be familar with.

  • Software Carpentry’s approach to presenting Lesson content lends itself to a simple Re/De-branding

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