I agree with everything you're saying. I like my icons colorful, but the branding should stay green. I have also seen a lot of fans out there doing a lot of really good work, but somehow, someway we need to get them involved instead of splintered. How we can go about that I don't know but I think about it all the time and I'd really like to hear suggestions. With school and this new job at AT&T my time is limited to a handful of hours per week to contribute. The list that Andy sent around with goals to be accomplished and to set up a timeline for each set of tasks is a great idea so that we have material we can contribute to support of the marketing teams. I love that! After my first go-around during the launch of 12.2 I learned a lot, saw a lot and have a lot of ideas and one I think is to have a well established repository for artwork that is in a modifiable form that can be tweaked by any one of the artists. If I create something I want to submit to the project there should be a documented location for it (GitHub?) and documentation on what "editable" format to submit it in XCF or SVG so that later down the road someone may want to use it but it needs some editing here and there, anyone on the Art team can pull that image and make the corrections for the marketing team to use for their needs. This way we build a large database of pre-existing images that builds and cuts down on the amount of last minute work the Art team needs to pull out of a hat. It's much easier to tweak existing than to build from scratch all the time. While GitHub works great for revision control (IMHO) it's not that great for being able to view images in a hurry like Flickr or a Picasa account where the thumbnails are easy to browse through. Maybe we should consider something along those lines where Marketing can go and view images from a variety of usages like wallpaper, templates, branding, logos and such then have a link with that image to the exact GitHub location where the core file is stored? We could add the GitHub link into the description field of what gets loaded up to Flickr? I know what we have is already "kind of" there or no one has turned me onto it yet. On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Bryen M Yunashko <suserocks@bryen.com> wrote:
On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 18:39 -0700, DuBois, Scott L. wrote:
As for icons and widows and such, I think we should stay with shades of green or whatever specific icons would be appropriate for their usage, but focused on green. Ubuntu has their orange and Fedora has their blue and we have our green and I think that should stay congruent throughout whatever "eye candy" we change.
I should probably mention here that at last year's openSUSE Conference's Artwork team BoF, a lot of artists complained that "green" is a very difficult color to work with. While I'll settle for green as our general color in terms of branding, I think, based on what I was hearing from the artists there, we should not make our icons and such beholden to The Green. Free yourselves up a bit, i say. Assuming you guys even want to go down this path.
I'm no artist, so I'm just an outspoken lurker and consumer of the artwork team's services here. :-) But I think too much effort is spent on focusing on one thing at a time instead of diversifying the team to be able to have 'sub-teams' that address a variety of needs. Traditionally, I've seen the artwork team focus almost primarily on distro artwork and everything else being secondary.
But in fact, the artwork team serves a much broader need to the constituency and shouldn't lock itself into thinking just about distro or branding artwork and such. There's so many many things that I've often come to the artwork team to request and it gets unanswered because the team isn't mobilized for ready-response to daily requests. I honestly believe more time should be focused in how to respond to requests in timely manner in a variety of ways that are both unique and standardized across the board.
We're a Project, we're more than just a distro. We have artwork needs for a number of initiatives under the Project umbrella. Conferences, products, marketing materials, desktops, etc. etc.
By the way, another area I think that needs some focus is recruitment. Look on Facebook and Forums and other sites beyond our ML and IRC and you'll find hundreds of examples of creative design for openSUSE. Some really really really damn beautiful stuff is out there and some talented people who love openSUSE for sure. But there's no effort to connect the gap between talent and team.
I think once you can broaden the team to have more people that are able to respond to specific types of tasks that they are personally interested in, you'll be able to have more time and resources to focus on the specific silos you want to address, including branding.
Bryen
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-- God bless ! Scott DuBois www.ROGUEHORSE.com openSUSE -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org