Hi, On Sep 24, 2012, at 10:43 PM, Eugene Trounev wrote:
openSUSE Summit has come and gone, and now it's time to draw the line. Many people has been spoken to, many discussions took place and the end result of all those discussions is the following proposal. [Please Note: the proposal is from ME personally, and is targeted at the artwork team AND the developmental team, as I strongly believe in community involvement]
A) It has been discussed on-and-off for some time that openSUSE is in dare need of re-branding, or to be even more precise - of branding, as there currently is practically none. Changing a default wallpaper from one release to another does not constitute a strong, recognizable brand name. As a part of the branding precess (should we agree on one at all) we will attempt to: i) Develop openSUSE specific styling guidelines; iI) Develop openSUSE specific look and feel including - icons, desktop theme, window theme; iii) Restyle the website to follow the guidelines and the desktop theme conventions; iv) [Possibly] redesign the logo itself None of those changes however are going to happen tomorrow, or even in the next release. If any of these does happen it's only upon the grater community consent and involvement. So, consider this to be an [active] proposal, and start the discussion.
I agree mainly with your thoughts. We need to have a design guide/brand manual in order achieve a coordinated look and feel across all of the openSUSE "products" (desktop, web, etc.). However, this takes a lot of time and a team of skilled designers with one person in charge - otherwise it rapidly becomes one large discussion about everything and nothing at the same time, people leave, etc. Someone has to, in the end, stand up and make a decision. Naturally, given a first instance it will then evolve over time. I do not think it would be right at this point in time to determine exactly what needs to be changed but rather to define something better and then see how we can implement this across the products.
B) Now to the near future (next release). I would like to propose a few changes to the current artwork and styling process. i) To separate the boot-loader image from the desktop wallpaper and make those into two totally separate efforts ii) The boot-loader (including GRUB, boot-splash, and login) will be styled by the artwork team internally and should be as simple as possible and vector based iii) The wallpaper will be decided upon via contest (just like the last time), but this time around we do it entirely with the collection from Flickr, and demand specific copyright license for each picture submitted
While I agree with your ideas for grub, this remains a technical issue. If the implementation becomes too hard due to technical issues then we naturally need to re-assess our plan. Generally speaking though, grub should probably always use its own design, to whatever extent. We could do a LOT to improve the wallpaper contest. If anyone is interested we could discuss this in more detail in a separate email. All in all, what I miss most is someone or a team of someones who coordinate efforts, push info out to the public, and generally keep things going. Kenneth Wimer -- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org