Corporate Marketing

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Welcome to the Coporate Marketing Handbook

The Corporate Marketing team includes Content Marketing, Corporate Events, PR, and Design. Corporate Marketing is responsible for the stewardship of the GitLab brand and the company's messaging/positioning. The team is the owner of the Marketing website and oversees the website strategy. Corporate Marketing develops a global, integrated communication strategy, executes globally, and enables field marketing to adapt and apply global strategy regionally by localizing and verticalizing campaigns for in-region execution. Corporate marketing also ensures product marketing, outreach, and marketing & sales development are conducted in a way that amplifies our global brand.

On this page

Brand personality

GitLab's brand has a personality that is reflected in everything we do. It doesn't matter if we are hosting a fancy dinner with fortune 500 CIOs, at a hackathon, or telling our story on about.gitlab.com…across all our communication methods, and all our audiences, GitLab has a personality that shows up in how we communicate.

Our personality is built around four main characteristics.

  1. Human: We write like we talk. We avoid buzzwords and jargon, and instead communicate simply, clearly, and sincerely. We treat people with kindness.
  2. Competent: We are highly accomplished, and we communicate with conviction. We are efficient at everything we do.
  3. Quirky: We embrace diversity of opinion. We embrace new ideas based on their merit, even if they defy commonly held norms.
  4. Humble: We care about helping those around us achieve great things more than we care about our personal accomplishments.

These four characteristics work together to form a personality that is authentic to GitLab team members, and relatable to our audience. If we were quirky without being human we could come across as eccentric. If we were competent without being humble we could come across as arrogant.

GitLab has a higher purpose. We want to inspire a sense of adventure in those around us so that they join us in contributing to making that mission a reality.

Style guide and tone of voice

The following guide outlines the set of standards used for all written company communications to ensure consistency in voice, style, and personality across all of GitLab's public communications.

See General editorial style guidelines for more.

About

GitLab the community

GitLab is an open source project with a large community of contributors. Over 1,800 people worldwide have contributed to GitLab's source code.

GitLab the company

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open source project. GitLab Inc. is an active participant in our community (see our stewardship of GitLab CE for more information), as well as offering GitLab, a product (see below).

GitLab the product

GitLab is a single applicaiton for the complete DevOps lifecyle. See the product elevator pitch for additional messaging.

Tone of voice

The tone of voice we use when speaking as GitLab should always be informed by our Content Strategy. Most importantly, we see our audience as co-conspirators, working together to define and create the next generation of software development practices. The below table should help to clarify further:

We are: We aren't:
Equals in our community Superior
Knowledgeable Know-it-alls
Empathetic Patronizing
Straightforward Verbose
Irreverent Disrespectful
Playful Jokey
Helpful Dictatorial
Transparent Opaque

We explain things in the simplest way possible, using plain, accessible language.

We keep a sense of humor about things, but don't make light of serious issues or problems our users or customers face.

We use colloquialisms and slang, but sparingly (don't look like you're trying too hard!).

We use inclusive, gender-neutral language.

Design

Requesting design help

  1. Create an issue in the corresponding project repository
    1. For tasks pertaining to about.gitlab.com create an issue in the www-gitlab-com project.
    2. For all other marketing related tasks create an issue in the marketing project.
  2. Add all relevant details, goal(s), purpose, resources, and links in the issue description. Also @ mention team members who will be involved.
  3. Set due date (if possible) — small last-minute requests are OK, we understand, but in order to do our best work let's not make a habit of it.
  4. Add the Design and Website Redesign (if applicable) label(s) to your issue.

The Design label in issue tracker

The Design label helps us find and track issues relevant to the Design team. If you create an issue where Design is the primary focus, please use this label.

Project prioritization

Per the Design team's discretion, the prioritization of design projects will be based on the direct impact on Marketing.

To get a better sense of marketing project prioritization, you can view the Design Issue Board. More specifically the Design - Working On and Design - Top Priority lists.

Design projects within the www-gitlab-com project can be tracked using the Design label. The prioritization of projects for about.gitlab.com can be viewed on the Website Issue Board.

Any design requests that do not fall in line with the goals and objectives of Marketing will be given a lower priority and factored in as time allows.

Design touchpoints

The Design team has a rather wide reach and plays a big part in almost all marketing efforts. Design touchpoints range from the GitLab website to print collateral, swag, and business cards. This includes, but certainly not limited to:

Web & Digital

Field Design & Branding

Content Design

In the spirit of 'everyone can contribute' (as well as version control and SEO) we prefer webpages over PDFs. We will implement a print.css component to these webpages so that print PDFs can still be utilized for events and in-person meetings without the headache of version control

Brand Guidelines

To download the GitLab logo (in various formats and file types) check out our Press page.

GitLab trademark & logo guidelines

GitLab is a registered trademark of GitLab, Inc. You are welcome to use the GitLab trademark and logo, subject to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The most current version of the GitLab logo can be found on our Press page.

Under the Creative Commons license, you may use the GitLab trademark and logo so long as you give attribution to GitLab and provide a link to the license. If you make any changes to the logo, you must state so, along with the attribution, and distribute under the same license.

Your use of the GitLab trademark and logo:

Examples of improper use of the GitLab trademark and logo:

The Tanuki

The tanuki is a very smart animal that works together in a group to achieve a common goal. We feel this symbolism embodies GitLab's vision that everyone can contribute, our values, and our open source stewardship.

Colors

While the brand is ever-evolving, the GitLab brand currently consists of six primary colors that are used in a wide array of marketing materials.

Hex/RGB

GitLab Hex/RGB Colors

Typography

The GitLab brand is paired with two typefaces. Lato for large display type and headlines, and Source Sans Pro for body copy; or main blocks of written content.

GitLab Product UX Guide

The goal of this guide is to provide written standards, principles and in-depth information to design beautiful and effective GitLab features. This is a living document and will be updated and expanded as we iterate.

GitLab Product UX Design Pattern Library

We've broken out the GitLab interface into a set of atomic pieces to form this design pattern library. This library allows us to see all of our patterns in one place and to build consistently across our entire product.

Brand oversight

Occasionally the old GitLab logo is still in use on partner websites, diagrams or images, and within our own documentation. If you come across our old logo in use, please bring it to our attention by creating an issue in the Marketing issue tracker. Please include a link and screenshot (if possible) in the description of the issue and we will follow-up to get it updated. Thanks for contributing to our brand integrity!

Design System

Brand resources

Asset libraries

Icons

Icon patterns

Social media

Templates

Presentation decks

Swag

GitLab is a single applicaiton for the complete DevOps lifecyle. See the product elevator pitch for additional messaging.

For GitLabbers Attending Events/ Speaking
Finding and Suggesting Speakers and Submitting to CFPs

Corporate events

Goals

General editorial style guidelines

We use American English by default and follow the AP Style guide unless otherwise noted in this style guide. We do not use title case.

Abbreviations

Acronyms

When using acryonyms or initialisms, ensure that your first mention uses the full term and includes the shortened version in parentheses directly afterwards. From then on you may use the acronym or initialism instead.

Example: A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) is the industry standard for open source contributions to other projects.

Below are some common acroynms and initialisms we use which don't need to be defined first (but use sparingly, see Tone of voice above):

Ampersands

Use ampersands only where they are part of a company's name or the title of a publication or similar. Example: Barnes & Noble

Do not use as a substitute for "and."

Capitalization

Use sentence case for all titles and headings.

All GitLab feature names must be capitalized. Examples: GitLab Issue Boards, GitLab Pages.

See below for styling of specific words.

Contractions

We favor contractions ("can't," "didn't," "it's," "we're") to sound more human and less formal.

Formatting

Lists

Numbers

Spell out one to nine. Use numerals for 10 upwards. Try to avoid beginning a sentence with a number, but if unavoidable, spell it out.

Numbers with four or more digits should include a comma. Examples: 1,800; 100,000

Punctuation

Only one space after a period is necessary.

Include one space after ellipses (… )

See below for when to hyphenate specific words.

We use en dashes (–) rather than em dashes (—). Include a space before and after the dash.

Quotes

Use double quotation marks for direct quotes, and single quotation marks for a quote within a quote. Single quotation marks may also be used for specialist terms or sayings.

Include punctuation in quotation marks.

Example: What do you think of the claim, "software is eating the world?"

Word choice

When in doubt, use the "future" styling of a word. So, "internet" is not capitalized, "startup" is not hyphenated, etc.

Word list

How to spell and style commonly used words.

Appendix A: When to use en dashes and semicolons

Appendix B: UK vs. American English

Use American spelling in your communications. Please consult this list of spelling differences.

Swag

Community Swag Requests:

Email your request to sponsorships@gitlab.com. In your request please include the expected number of guests, the best shipping address, and phone number along with what kind of swag you are hoping for. The swag we have available can be found on our online store. Note: We recommend you request swag at least 4 weeks out from the event date or we may not be able to accommodate your request.

Internal GitLab swag ordering:

Swag for customer/ prospects

Anyone with access to Salesforce can send swag through Salesforce directly. Please review sending swag to customers paramaters. Instructions on how to do so below:

  1. Create general task for whichever contact you want to send swag to. You need to create a task and save it before the "order swag" button will show up as an option in the task menu.
  2. Go into created and saved task and click the button that says "order swag".
  3. If you do not see the window pop up for ordering, please check your pop up settings and verify pop ups are not being blocked.
  4. Previous step will bring up a printfrection page where you can order desired swag. (please note not all swag is listed in sfdc, for more options email emily@gitlab.com).

Speakers

For GitLabbers Attending Events/ Speaking
Finding and Suggesting Speakers and Submitting to CFPs

Corporate Events

Goals

Edit this page — please contribute. Creative Commons License