When the new board was sat in October, we had already been talking about our vision for AST’s future. AST has survived for over a decade, though a few years ago, it was a pretty close thing. AST exists today because people fought for it, and brought AST back to being healthier than ever. We inherit an AST that is on sound financial footing because of the last few boards.
From this position of strength, it falls to us to increase AST’s impact for our members and on the world. We have a great responsibility, and a significant opportunity to make an impact for AST and its members. We will not be caretakers. We are less interested in rehashing where AST was, but very interested in where AST is going.
Our members are smart, driven, thinking testers that have to make their way in a world that is still largely unaware of CDT, explaining modern testing from square one again and again, even though the majority of the new thinking about software testing this century has come from the CDT school. To improve AST’s influence, in order to help our members and improve testing, we need to grow our organization and establish our brand.
We started thinking about what an AST ten times larger than today’s would look like. We talked through some ideas for finding new members, retaining current members, and changing what AST presents to and asks from the world. We built a Trello board, and got to work.
One of the tasks on our Trello board was a new logo. When we traced some of the other ideas we had, many of them would benefit from coming after a logo change instead of before, so we moved the logo task up. We used a crowd-sourced contest process (99designs.com) to review 100+ professional designs, and found one we like very much. Here is AST’s new logo:
We have retained the magnifying glass theme (in white, red lens) to reflect our community’s emphasis on careful examination. The magnifying glass is now impacting a surface, splashing four droplets that represent:
- Education (BBST, Webinars, Mentoring, etc)
- Conferences (CAST, and events we support)
- Community (Volunteering, Grants, SIGs, etc)
- Advocacy (Testing as a Profession, articulating CDT principles, policy)
We look forward to developing these themes more. We need to demonstrate to our current, future, and former members that AST is worthy of their past and ongoing support, both with membership, and with time and involvement.
Below are a few more versions of the logo we will use electronically, in print, on clothing and bags, and anywhere else we’ve previously used the bug logo.
The black logo will look great on a black polo shirt, right? The red one on a hat? More on this soon.
We’ve made a point of “not letting perfect be the enemy of the merely good”, and established a bias towards action. While we want to do a great job and nail the details, we also want to be able to complete things and move to the other things on our list. We take this approach knowing that we will make mistakes, even though we serve a community of testers that notices things we haven’t thought of.
We have a list of places we will update the logo, but we also know that there will be versions of the old logo(s) in BBST, previous years’ conference materials, videos, etc, and we are willing to live with that while we phase them out. If you would like to report a bug, please report them to technology at association for software testing dot org.
Thanks for supporting AST. The tasks we started just a few weeks ago are already starting to bear fruit, and we are eager to share the other things we’re working on. Stay tuned!
– Eric Proegler, for the AST Board of Directors
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