Hi All, As you can see in the published Release timeline for 12.3, the openSUSE Artwork Deadline was Thursday 24th Jan http://turing.suse.de/~coolo/opensuse_12.3/ As of 5PM UTC on Wed 30th Jan (ie almost a week later) the state of our team todo list (on wiki here: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Artwork_Todo) was as follows: Urgent Tasks: Grub2 - Work not started gfxboot - Work not started YaST - Work not started Removal of application branding - Work not started Plymouth - complete, only polishing required (tittiatcoke) KDM - complete (MM) ksplash - complete (MM) kdelibs - complete (sumski) SUSEgreeter - complete (sumski) Less Urgent: GDM - Done (ilmehtar) GNOME dynamic wallpaper - Done, polishing still required (ilmehtar) Grub, gfxboot and YaST are the first 3 things users to 12.3 will see. In order to avoid the horrifically embarrassing situation of these key parts of 12.3 being released with 12.2's branding still in place, I hurriedly through things together and got them submitted. I'm not happy with how they look, and I'm hoping that we can play on the sympathies of the release team to speedily accept any polishing from me and anyone else over the next few days so 12.3 is not a complete artistic trainwreck. This is my plea for 13.1 to the whole team. Please do not let this happen again. We have this list full of people who are apparently keen to contribute to the artwork and branding of openSUSE, but when the time comes, we never seem to get the goods. Unlike previous releases, I do not think this can be explained as 'we did not know what to do'. A great deal of effort has been put in to explain the current situation, the current requirements, and simple ToDo lists have been put together.. and yet still we find ourselves in this situation. I've heard the complaints that people like me 'monopolise' the process, but even when I step back, do my best to inform what needs to be done and leave it to others to do it, we find ourselves in this situation.. I feel that far too often, openSUSE is relying on hackers like myself, tigerfoot & tittiatcoke to pull things out of the bag at the last minute, and given these people are not artists (nor wish to be) I think we'd all accept than the end result isn't as artistic as we'd like, or as openSUSE deserves. I don't think anyone likes this current situation, so we need the Artwork team producing art that can be used in the functions of the distribution. SUSE may be hiring a Graphic Designer to work on openSUSE, but when they do, I want them to find a functioning artwork team for them to collaborate with, not just a bunch of hackers desperate for relief from doing something which comes unnaturally to them. Please roll up your sleeves, put on your thinking caps, and get involved with the Marketing/Artwork hackathon next week so we can set the foundation for making 13.1 better than this https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:12.3_marketing_hackathon Regards Richard Brown Branding Package Maintainer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org