On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 4:43 PM, Eugene Trounev <eugene.trounev@gmail.com> 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 cannot agree more with these ideas. There has been a historical lack of progress on the artwork done for the distribution with a palpable loss of graphical identity on the desktop. It seems more than appropriate for the times, given the many changes and deviations on the Linux desktop, to create something still traditional and, at the same time, updated to follow the focus on strong branding for our distribution. I think it is also good to point out that whatever changes we make are strong enough that they will stay in the distribution for a long time. Changing graphics and turning around our design objective with every release can confuse users. Take for example, android, iOS, Ubuntu Unity, or even Gnome 3 and KDE 4. They seem to keep foundational design objectives and only improve on those with time.
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
I like this one a lot. It shows a difference in loading stages for the OS. On the one side is the booting process and on the other, there is the desktop.
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
Love this idea. We know that the boot loader allows very little graphical customization whereas Plymouth does allow a ton more. So we would need to find good balance between simple graphics but also elegant ones.
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
This suggestion will give strong importance to contributions on Flickr. They have a large user base and many can be attracted into placing high quality photographs on the Flickr pool. We should probably start encouraging our project members who do photography to collaborate in this initiative.
This is all for now. Please let me know what are your thoughts/comments on A) & B)
Best Regards,
Eugene Trounev
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