Kicking off the ATproto Swag Team

The first ATmosphereConf is quickly approaching and we would love to have some swag to remember it by. The conference is organized by a team of volunteers and is being paid for by ticket sales and the generous support of several sponsors. We are looking to the ATProtocol community to come up with designs for swag that will support the first conference and future community events.

Today we are kicking off the ATProtocol Swag Team! Can we celebrate this first conference by having a handful of community created designs and having people buy the designs & t-shirts they like? Can we come up with a mascot for the conference or the community? Do you want to contribute a design to be featured on the Community Swag Shop? Do you want some awesome drip when you are in Seattle?

Current logos and themes

We are all familiar with the Bluesky Butterfly logo and the blue skies and playful clouds. Bluesky has also created the @ symbol with the cloud background and the "@ AT Protocol" logo. Numerous other projects have embraced the aerial theme with birds, butterflies, flying critters, smoke, wind, clouds, and the "@" symbol. The ecosystem is in the glossary as "atmosphere", which also gives us the name of the conference.

Conference logos and mascots

For ATmosphereConf, we are seeking designs for a logo and a mascot. One on hand, we look to other conferences like GopherCon and Barcamp, and on the other, ecosystems more generally.

We would love something fresh, that aligns with the community, and can be remixed for all sorts of uses. We don't have many constraints, these are the references we're pulling from today.

The Golang Gopher, Ferris the Crab for Rust (note the "unofficial" mascot phrasing), Elephants for Mastodon. These are examples of a single mascot for the ecosystem. On the other hand, ATProtocol will be more diverse and O'Reilly uses a more general animal menagerie. Where should the ATProtocol community and conference fit in?

Mascots and logos are often remixed to fit a context. Barcamp has a whole series of logos for locations, events, and sub-communities (the preview image for this post are all the Barcamp remixes). Can we find a mascot or logo foundation to do similar? How close do we want to align with Bluesky and their themes, or do we want to carve out a new space like ATProtocol is doing itself?

The first ATmosphere Conference is in Seattle, do we reference that by name and / or city skyline with the Needle and Mt Rainier? Or lean into sports and figure out how a Kraken can fly?

We are very excited to see what you come up with, and totally open to feedback on what it means to riff on community swag.

Submit your designs

So what do you say? Do you want to create and submit some designs that we can put up in a store for people to order?

We value the work of artists and designers and you should keep the original copyright. We are a self-funded community conference and ask that you license it as CC-BY or CC-BY-NC. This will allow us to use it for stickers and t-shirts for the conference, with proceeds returning to the Community Fund.

1. Make a design that would be a fit for stickers and/or t-shirts.
2. Post it to Bluesky, tag it #atdesign and/or mention @atprotocol.dev.
3. We'll reshare it and encourage people to like and re-post to show which ones they like
4. We'll get the top designs added to some print-on-demand stores and get some stickers made for the conference.

Designs should be SFW and not contain copyrighted material.

And of course – get your ATmosphereConf tickets! We'll be hosting sessions about design, swag, and community building at the conference, so come participate.

Thank you to Tony @verdverm.com for stepping up to suggest and run with the ideas around getting a swag team going. He's also a conference sponsor with his blebbit.app project.