Our Personality
Brands, like people, have their own personalities. The Red Hat® brand is open, authentic, helpful, and brave. Every interaction with Red Hat should reflect these core traits.
Open
Our deep commitment to openness isn’t the secret to our success. It’s the reason for it. Our openness is rooted in the principles and practices of open source software development. This means anyone can see, study, and learn from the code. Everyone is free to participate and contribute modifications, and the end product is shared by all.
We follow and support the principles of open source.
We are transparent with our customers and each other.
We solicit ideas and feedback widely and often.
We use airy layouts with plenty of white space.
Our latest brand campaign messaging positions Red Hat as a leader in open source and continues to amplify and defend open source principles on behalf of our customers and communities.
In this social media graphic, we used an airy layout with plenty of white space to convey our open personality.
Authentic
We never pretend to be anything we’re not.
Internally, we are true to ourselves, our values, and our culture. In public, we’re honest and direct. We’re not flashy or boastful, and we don’t promise more than we can deliver. We don’t understate bad news or overstate good news. We avoid spin. With Red Hat, what you see is what you get.
Like our home state of North Carolina, our motto is esse quam videri: to be, rather than to seem.
We speak plainly, honestly, and without hyperbole.
We deliver what we promise.
We let our customers, partners, and associates tell their own stories.
We keep our designs straightforward and direct.
We use illustrations to highlight authentic situations, technologies, and environments that our audiences experience.
Our photographs always highlight real customers, partners, and associates. We give them space to tell their own authentic stories.
Helpful
Customers come to Red Hat because they need innovative open source technology that will help grow their organizations, but they don’t want to assume the risk of doing it alone. They need flexibility, but not the headaches or expense of curating their own open source portfolios.
We make open source safe and ready for enterprises. We fix problems when they arise and share everything we know with everyone who needs it. Red Hatters, and open source technologists in general, are inherently helpful.
We solve customers’ problems whether or not our technology is at fault.
We contribute code and support to the open source community.
We are considerate of our audience’s time and attention.
We communicate in an approachable, friendly, and informative way.
We developed a series of isometric illustrations to help customers and partners understand how our technologies work together and bring value to their business.
Co.Lab is a Red Hat initiative that helps children explore open source principles and aims to inspire them to use these principles in their own communities.
Brave
It’s taken a lot of faith and courage, sustained over many years, to build Red Hat. We had to believe we were right when our industry thought we were wrong.
And we had to fight for the right to share code and ensure that intellectual property law was not improperly used to stop us. (This is an important and fascinating chapter of Red Hat history. Learn more about our important role in shaping legal opinions that extended software freedoms for everyone.)
We defend open source principles on behalf of our customers and communities.
We fight legal and policy battles to protect open source liberties for ourselves and everyone else.
We keep the design simple and clean, using just the elements we need to communicate our point.
We’re not afraid to reevaluate what we’ve done to make sure it’s working as intended.
Our thought leadership web pages, like this one, explore the ways that new technologies are impacting the world and demonstrate these concepts through bold 3D, abstract, and interactive visuals.
When we launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, our promotional graphics used a bold typographic treatment centered around the ‘8’ while maintaining white space and legibility.
