Response to "Getting Fedora Out of the If-Then Loop"

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Freitag, den 19.02.2010, 17:10 -0500 schrieb Máirín Duffy:

> The ambassadors may well have made a decision in November, 
> but they sure as heck did not communicate that decision to the design team in
> a timely manner. We produced the same set of
> media labels we've always produced at the time we were allocated to
> in the widely-published design team schedule. I even made a blog
> post asking people if there was anything we were forgetting or
> needed to add, and no ambassadors spoke up for lxde and xfce there:
> 
> http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/getting-ready-for-f12-media-sleeves-and-labels/

By that time I was not in charge of this. I fact I never was. I just
took over after nothing happened for more than a month.

> We did not get a request until the week before the Christmas holidays [1],
> a month after the media labels were planned to be completed and at a 
> time when many of the design team members were resting after the
> hecticness of churning out the massive amount of work we always churn
> out right before a major release (F12). Work was produced after the Christmas holidays
> that was completely acceptable with respect to the standard formats we produce
> the media in. However, for some reason you felt the need to add desktop
> branding to the media (the design team has consciously chosen NOT to do this and I 
> personally believe it's a terrible idea) 

So why did nobody from the design team speak up when I filed the ticket?
If you expect the ambassadors to communicate their request in a timely
manner, then you should do the same.

> and generally stray away from the standard 
> template we have been using for three releases now. 

I am not a designer, I have no idea what templates or programs you use
and nobody bothered to tell me.

> Oh, and you didn't mention that you
> wanted those changes to the standard format until we had already invested time and
> effort into producing what you actually did ask for.

Sorry, with due respect: Nobody had done anything, so who invested time?

> Not only that! The sources to all the media labels we originally produced were available,
> from November on, so there was no reason to wait until the night before you needed the labels to
> start trying to work them out on your own!

This just isn't true. as you correctly say the request was opened on
2009-12-19. The event we needed the media for was FOSDEM which started
in 2010-02-06.

> In conclusion, your posting that you site is in NO WAY evidence of a 'little or no support' for
> spins. It's more evidence that:
> 
> 1) the design team needs help and needs to be treated more like human beings rather than robots. 
> the time around a release is the most stressful and demanding time for us.
> 
> 2) you need to be more explicit in what you are looking for when you make a request rather than
> waste a designer's time putting something together for you, only for you to reject it because she 
> couldn't read your mind and you never clearly explained what you were asking for

Tatica and me were in contact most of the time over IRC. She knew what I
was after and she did a very good job. I only did some small corrections
as outlined in the ticket.

The reason to start all over again was that you told me that the SVGs
created with inkscape wont work because they lack CMYK and we needed to
start all over again with scribus. So if someone wasted Taticas time I
don't think it was me.

I'm not sure if this waste could be avoided, but as the ticket was
assigned to you all the time and copies of all mails go over the
design-team-tickets mailing list, I think you and others should have
been aware of it.

> 3) don't make your initial request a month late! be understanding when youmake your requests right before 
> a major international holiday!

See above: FAmSCo was in charge of this.

> 4) realize any request you make of the design team that falls within calendar vicinity of a Fedora 
> release is not going to be high-priority because the team's highest-priority deliverables are
> the release artwork. The plan outlining the release artwork happens months in advance and is aligned
> to an extremely tight schedule. Since these labels were clearly not on that plan, they were treated 
> accordingly.

First you say I was a month late, then you say I should not open a
ticket close to release. If I opened the ticked at the beginning of
November when the decision was taken, it would have been just before
F12. Instead it was opened 2009-12-19 which means F12 was out the door
for a month and there was no trace of an upcoming release.

> One team you really need to refrain from picking on as an example of some
> conspiratorial anti-spins agenda is the design team. We have never, ever turned down a 
> request on the basis of who made it or for what team within the project it was for, and
> the spins.fpo site, especially the games spin site which was a huge effort
> almost everyone on the team contributed to (we did over 100 designs, one for each of 
> the individual games in the spin), was a huge project we took on over top of
> the usual release artwork deliverables we are responsible for. That was to
> directly benefit the spins!

I never said you turned down a turned down a request on the basis of who
made it, but it is evident that the design team has other priorities
than the spins. 

How much time have you spent on gnome-shell recently? A few days? A
week? But on the other hand there is nobody who has 2 or 3 hours to do
the spins media?

> ~m

Regards,
Christoph