[Design-team] Final wallpaper selection

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 01:03:11PM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 05:11:50PM +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
> > On 08/04/2009 04:50 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > > According to the Design schedule[1], today is the day to have the
> > > Alpha wallpapers bundled up in a package.  I believe Martin said that
> > > he could do the packaging, but was waiting on a selection by the
> > > team.  If I'm not mistaken, the things that need to happen are:
> > >
> > > * The team needs to decide on a selection of wallpaper for the F12
> > >    Alpha release today.
> > >
> > > * Ensure Martin knows the selection and packages the selection(s) into
> > >    Rawhide, replacing the Leonidas backgrounds, if possible, to save
> > >    space.
> > >
> > > Did I correctly capture everything?
> > 
> > Almost :p
> > The list server was lagging and the message probably delayed a bit but a 
> > few minutes ago Martin posted some preliminary packages:
> > http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-August/000649.html
> 
> Excellent -- I'm trying those out right now.
> 
> Seeing the backgrounds from the main package in action, I have one
> piece of feedback -- the mosaic-squares background might benefit from
> being angled in some fashion.  Perhaps this could be some perspective,
> as if the print of squares was on a wall angling away from the viewer
> at the top.  That would prevent the squares from making it a little
> more difficult to see icons on the desktop.  Hope this is helpful.

I spent a little time with all the backgrounds Martin kindly packaged.
One of the important things I noticed was that Maria's art is *much*
smaller in size than all the others.  This is a significant factor in
deciding on default artwork because we are so squeezed for space on
CD-size Live spins.

We recently moved from Tomboy to Gnote in the Desktop spin for Fedora
12.  This saves space by eliminating the Mono stack from that Spin,
saving us megabytes worth of space we can use for other software.
Although all the artists should be commended for their beautiful work,
I think it would be very hypocritical of Fedora to eliminate software
for space reasons while retaining very large artwork files.  In some
cases these files are 2 or 3 MB in size, which is significant in the
context of a CD-sized spin.

Maria's art looks like the only art that is more of a vector-based
illustration, which I recall the Design team had said was going to be
preferred for this release.  I think there are some improvements we
could make to that background to make it more usable and functional,
as I wrote earlier.  But further, I think we should be considering
space as a factor in the decision for default background.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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