On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 4:43 AM, Eugene Trounev <eugene.trounev@gmail.com> wrote:

A) As a part of the branding precess (should we agree on one at all) we will attempt to: i) Develop openSUSE specific styling guideline;

Love this idea. Current styling guidelines (seem to ) focus on "how to draw logo" and "resources you can use", but apparently we don't draw our logo that much. If you want to design something, eg themes, all you can find is "color usage", but if you don't know what elements are available, your design is hard to implement. eg: If you design a G/KDM userlist with password prompt linked to the first user, it's hard to implement. Because it's LightDM style actually. Greeter.dtd has no such implementation. So it actually forces designers to know Linux coding. such designers are treasures, really hard to get.

iI) Develop openSUSE specific look and feel including - icons, desktop theme, window theme;

Icons doesn't matter that much. But DE themes are important for users to distinguish that he's using openSUSE. As upstreams in recent years are putting their hands here and there( that's okay, but the hands should be put at the place they're really good at), we need to better show our existence.

iii) Restyle the website to follow the guidelines and the desktop theme conventions;

It seems that users have established the feeling that "bento is openSUSEish". so I think this idea need to be evaluated carefully.

iv) [Possibly] redesign the logo itself

How about remove the texts, just keep the gecko?

B) 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

How about Flickr, Deviantart and 500px.com? Deviantart has groups focusing on Linux theming. Most wallpapers there are licensed under CC license. and most wallpapers there are digital arts instead of photography. There's already an open source culture there. 500px.com are full of "cutting-edge" photography. Using Flickr itself isn't enough for us to elect nice wallpapers. The recent Fedora 18 wallpaper contest is solely based on Flickr, but its result doesn't seem good enough. In my opinion, Fedora 18's wallpapers are just "default wallpapers" which certainly will be replaced by users themselves. Marguerite -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org

I think a lot of these are good ideas. I believe Kenneth said it well that to do this effectively will require significant, well explained definition, of a "how to" pull this off for those artistic users who wish to design brand specific.

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 do think the website could use some "glitter" if you will as compared to the websites of other distributions (IMHO) it lacks a real advertising value to it. We are after all selling a product even though we don't charge any money for it. Redesigning Geeko and the logo are an interesting idea. I think we should not stray "too far" from being still similar yet separate from SUSE and I think Bryan has a good idea with adding "project" in there. I think it gives a nice community feel to it "openSUSE Project" sounds nice, I like that. 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. Will mentioned something that makes a lot of sense and that was that many people (myself inclusive) customize their desktops, icon themes and such from the liveries so in that respect a set of default icons that change can be a project people can submit for possible adaptation to any future distribution, but there are also a lot of people who like to get comfortable recognizing certain icons to specific applications without much change. We might be best to leave this one alone?

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

I think this all sounds fine. We can use Flickr if that works for everyone else. Whatever we decide on should be easily accessible and easy for people to see and use so more people can participate, vote, add and be a part of the whole process. The guidelines we have are pretty good in the wiki, but could use a little polish so they don't sound so "techy" or boxed in with a ton of rules and guidelines that will scare people off from even making an attempt to produce images we can use in releases. As I've said before, I'm all for change and doing whatever it takes to help make openSUSE a fun project where people will want to use our product, hang out and be a part of the process in any big or small way that they want to help. I think as long as we don't lose focus on that aspect of it, whatever we decide will probably turn out ok. : ) On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 1:43 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.

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

This is all for now. Please let me know what are your thoughts/comments on A) & B)

Best Regards,

Eugene Trounev

[it-s] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org

-- 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

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

On 24 September 2012 21:43, Eugene Trounev <eugene.trounev@gmail.com> wrote:

As a part of the branding precess (should we agree on one at all) we will attempt to: i) Develop openSUSE specific styling guidelines;

This makes sense, and I think it would be a good idea.

iI) Develop openSUSE specific look and feel including - icons, desktop theme, window theme;

Really? One of the last things we need to spend time and effort on is icons. Goodness knows there are enough of the damned things out there. We have basically settled on two icon sets if I'm not mistaken, Tango for GNOME and Oxygen for KDE, what's wrong with these? I also disagree with having a new desktop/window theme, the defaults work exceptionally well.

iii) Restyle the website to follow the guidelines and the desktop theme conventions;

The web presence is where most of the styling is needed, the desktops are fine as they are. How do we differentiate our GNOME from say Fedora? I'm not so sure, but diverging from upstream even in something like theme is wrong IMHO.

iv) [Possibly] redesign the logo itself

HELL NO! If your reasoning for re-designing the logo is that SUSE redesigned theirs well the simple answer is they had to. SUSE is effectively a new company, and as such they needed to make a clean start and they only slightly modified their old logo. If you saw Nils' opening keynote he jokingly suggested that SUSE should replace the Geeko with a Purple Dog that barked more, people made it clear that any major change to the logo would be disastrous. The logo makes up a large part of who we are. Regards, Andy -- Andrew Wafaa IRC: FunkyPenguin GPG: 0x3A36312F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org

Christian Boltz ✆ via opensuse.org

For "insiders", it is obvious that geeko means openSUSE, so they don't need any additional text.

But for people who don't know something about openSUSE, keeping "openSUSE" in the logo is important so that they know our name and, if everything else fails, can google for it. You'll get much better search results for "openSUSE" than for "green chameleon linux" ;-)

I don't think it makes sense to have a logo that only insiders understand... ;-)

This is an excellent point. Definitely keep the name in there. I think it is important that we always consider the "newbies" and look at everything from "fresh eyes" as best we can so that we ARE easy to find and recognize by those who are possibly toying with the idea of getting involved vs. those of us who are involved and looking from our own perspective of what we ALREADY know and recognize. Rajko rmatov101@charter.net via opensuse.org

Gweeen :)

Once upon a time only Geeko was green, but distro was mostly light blue. If my memory is not failing, the only color that was absent was bright red, or should I say Red Hat red.

Someone said Fedora - blue, Ubuntu - orange so what is left for us? Green. Not so fast, really. Linux Mint is telling that green is their color, like in Irish green.

In other words I don't want to give up on different colors.

If Geeko is really chameleon then limiting it to green is giving up its primary property, ability to be in any color.

That SUSE logo is green and under trademark protection doesn't meant that the same shape can't be produced in any color and their combinations, including pink with white round spots. It will find its place under the Sun.

I see the point you are making here and I'm just not sure about it. It's like a favorite sports team changing colors ya know? It just doesn't happen. Logo tweaks, ok as long as the overall is pretty much recognizable but color? That's just my feeling on it.

As usually, we create phone book with links to other people work. Then use categories that is easy to attach to article to sort links.

We can use, what you started recently, top potion of article in Category namespace for short intro to topic. MediaWiki will automatically populate bottom with articles, images, files tagged with that category. The only problem with this technique is that category naming must be good, as there is no simple method to change name, as you already learned :)

When said tagged, in wiki parlance that is categorized, but it works just as tagging in all other places.

Now this is an interesting thought. I think we would have to mock a page up to see how we could pull this off without the article looking like just a clutter of links.

Maybe some kind of artwork checklist. * have some artwork * check that is in editable form, svg or xcf * check that is publishable (no nekkid stuff in hidden layers) * place in local git repo * merge with github * make it jpg, or png * upload to Flickr * add comment with github location

I bet some steps are missing.

Now with workflow like that go to opensuse-programming and ask volunteers that can create script that will do all above at once. (We have connections to real geeks, don't we?) Then because opensuse-programming is not well populated we have to go to some other list and ask the same pointing -programming article.

Pretty much what I was thinking yes, however, an automated script to handle this I think would be unlikely since password entrance is required into Flickr. I love the idea though and if it "is" possible that would be truly awesome! Let me play around with the idea on a couple of different web storage formats and see if I can come up with something simple to use and replicate. On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 7:32 PM, Rajko <rmatov101@charter.net> wrote:

Hi Scott,

On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 23:09:52 -0700 "DuBois, Scott L." <ranger@roguehorse.com> wrote:

...

I agree with everything you're saying. I like my icons colorful, but the branding should stay green.

Gweeen :)

Once upon a time only Geeko was green, but distro was mostly light blue. If my memory is not failing, the only color that was absent was bright red, or should I say Red Hat red.

Someone said Fedora - blue, Ubuntu - orange so what is left for us? Green. Not so fast, really. Linux Mint is telling that green is their color, like in Irish green.

In other words I don't want to give up on different colors.

If Geeko is really chameleon then limiting it to green is giving up its primary property, ability to be in any color.

That SUSE logo is green and under trademark protection doesn't meant that the same shape can't be produced in any color and their combinations, including pink with white round spots. It will find its place under the Sun.

...

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.

As usually, we create phone book with links to other people work. Then use categories that is easy to attach to article to sort links.

We can use, what you started recently, top potion of article in Category namespace for short intro to topic. MediaWiki will automatically populate bottom with articles, images, files tagged with that category. The only problem with this technique is that category naming must be good, as there is no simple method to change name, as you already learned :)

When said tagged, in wiki parlance that is categorized, but it works just as tagging in all other places.

...

... established repository for artwork that is in a modifiable form that can be tweaked by any one of the artists. ... "editable" format to submit it in XCF or SVG so that later ... anyone on the Art team can pull that image and make the corrections for the marketing team to use for their needs. ....

That was one of ideas given on IRC, to have repo of ready to go templates. If given in SVG format one can reuse elements, ie. create 3-4 tree shapes, and when you need forest just run wild with mirroring and resizing. Who will tell that forest is made out of few original shapes.

...

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 ...

Maybe some kind of artwork checklist. * have some artwork * check that is in editable form, svg or xcf * check that is publishable (no nekkid stuff in hidden layers) * place in local git repo * merge with github * make it jpg, or png * upload to Flickr * add comment with github location

I bet some steps are missing.

Now with workflow like that go to opensuse-programming and ask volunteers that can create script that will do all above at once. (We have connections to real geeks, don't we?) Then because opensuse-programming is not well populated we have to go to some other list and ask the same pointing -programming article.

-- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org

-- 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