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 <jimmac@novell.com> Novell, Inc. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+help@opensuse.org