Hi folks,
I'd like to welcome everyone on the list and start an initial discussion
to get the project move forward a bit.
Historically the openSUSE look has been designed internally. I believe
we aught to change that and make use of a broader community even in this
area.
I've been involved with GIMP and GNOME project initially. While being
free software projects, we have developed the artwork in a fairly closed
manner. We thought doing everything ourselves will give us better
control of the consistency and avoid horrors of design by committee [1].
But the amount of work required to keep things consistent is way bigger
than two blokes could handle.
With the Tango project[2] we took a different approach, setting up some
basic style guidelines and allow community members to focus on
particular projects' needs. And I think this worked out much better.
Yes, art direction is needed, but it would be nice to make use of the
talent in the community. We make use of the hacking, translation or
documentation skills of the community. Let's leverage the pixel pushin'
power as well!
Pixel Brainstorming
-------------------
This is all food for discussion, but I'm proposing a three stage
approach. We come up with some basic infrastructure to allow members of
the openSUSE community submit ideas and mockups of how they would like
the next release to look. I think a mediawiki is a good-enough solution
for posting image mockups.
We wouldn't necessarily limit the scope of this idea-brainstorm phase,
just some core style guidelines I'm going to talk about later. People
will go wild and post their ideas. The next stage would be to pick the
best elements from these ideas and work out final designs. Most of this
work would best be done with the resources available at Novell/SUSE. The
last step would be implementation.
Alternatively we narrow the scope of each new style change. Say the next
version of openSUSE will include focus on machine virtualization, so we
try to come up with adjectives that describe such functionality --
virtual, artificial, non-physical, emulated, maintainable... and then
develop themes based around these adjectives. The next stage would
remain the same as above, cherry-picking, polish and implement.
Major vs Minor
--------------
In the past, each version of openSUSE looked radically different from
the previous one. While it does bring some excitement to the product,
there really isn't any evolution and gradual polish involved. So my next
proposal is to only do the radical changes for major version releases
and do variations of the the theme for the minor version updates. I hope
to illustrate that a little if time allows.
Infrastructure
==============
WIKI
----
The opensuse.org mediawiki is quite sufficient for managing artwork
mockups, we just need to figure out some structure for this.
SVN
---
To better manage and share graphical assets we probably want to set up a
public svn repository. While not a typical tool for an artist, SVN
allows for relatively easy version control, deals with binary files
well, and allows to check out the latest version through a web
interface. The barrier for entry isn't impossible to overcome.
In the past we've maintained branches for individual products/versions
(SLED10, SUSE10.2, etc.) and put the common reusable assets in trunk
(logos, palettes, templates, etc.). I belive that sort of structure
would work for us as well, but on opensuse.org.
Of course there are some challenges. We need to have some legal
evaluation regarding the use of the logos. While I believe we should
allow the use of the openSUSE and geeko logos, there are some strict
guidelines regarding the use of Novell logos and trademarks[3].
This Mailing List
-----------------
This ML is meant to be used for discussion around specific designs as
well as general openSUSE artwork-related issues. It's not meant for
upstream project artwork discussions even though openSUSE ships it.
Action Items
============
* Write down basic style guidelines for openSUSE theming. (me)
* Create a list of thing that need theming and some tips for each
(based off the current styling status pages [4]. The list should
be extended with widget and window manager themes) (me)
* Set up svn repository at svn.opensuse.org/svn/opensuse-artwork/
(??)
* Unify and structure the artwork related documents on the
opensuse.org wiki. (??, martin seemed interested in giving the
mess some structure ;)
Let's rock!
[1] http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci874014,00.html
[2] http://www.tango-project.org
[3] http://www.novell.com/company/legal/copyrights/images.html
[4] http://en.opensuse.org/Branding_Overview:os10.3
--
Jakub Steiner