Our most recent comic strip, Ubuntufied Flying Object, was also our submission to the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. We decided to go with a Ubuntu-themed comic, with a bonus punchline of “Linux for human sentient beings”, based on the wordmark and tagline that Ubuntu has used for the past six years.

Of course Murphy’s law has struck. After all this time using the same logo and styling, it seems that Ubuntu 10.04 will be the first release to use a new design. The “circle of friends” motif remains, so the main joke of our strip still works, but the tagline is gone – making our secondary punchline redundant.

Now I don’t know how strictly these new branding guidelines will be enforced on the CD’s content – particularly as the Free Culture Showcase deals with third-party contributions in an “Examples” folder – but we don’t want to take ourselves out of the running from the start. So we’ve produced another version of this strip, foregoing the secondary punchline, and changing the colours in the first panel to better reflect the new style.

Although we still prefer the original strip, if you really want to download the re-themed strip you can find it here.