[Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 12:23 +0100, Fabian A. Scherschel wrote:
> Wow..... Just heard about this now. With all due respect, this is
> BULLSHIT. You are telling me you couldn't have told the team earlier?
> Maybe BEFORE we all started ramping up to do the F15 wallpaper? This
> decision must've been in the works for quite some time.

There's no secret cabal meeting a backroom to make decisions about how
we configure GNOME in Fedora; just a bunch of developers with overfilled
todo lists.

Obviously, the GNOME artists have been working on the look of GNOME 3
for a while and selected the stripes background months ago. But it was
really only yesterday when we saw the notice for the sketching sessions
for the Fedora 15 background process that we connected the dots and
realized that couldn't be two things configured as the default
background for GNOME 3.0 in Fedora 15.

I certainly apologize for not bringing this up earlier. We should have
brought it up earlier. (But it's still pretty early in the process, too,
right?)

> This is disappointing as hell. I had expected nonsense like that
> within the Ubuntu community, but not with Fedora. This would've been a
> chance to really set Fedora apart and create the best Gnome 3
> experience everywhere in an open and transparent way. We've said so
> since the last GUADEC. That is what the Design Team is for. If we just
> dictate a wallpaper from up hight, that maybe transparent but it's not
> open. At least not in my understanding of it. And now this, out of
> nowhere. What exactly is the Design Team doing for F15 now? Why are we
> even there at all?

Our general approach with the GNOME components in Fedora is to work
upstream whenever possible. It's very seldom that there's a change that
makes sense in Fedora that doesn't make sense upstream. So we try to
just do the change upstream.

I think we'd see the art the same way; if the icons can be improved, if
we can do a more attractive widget theme, then we should do that for
GNOME.

So, I guess we haven't necessarily seen the need for a big process to
design artwork for GNOME 3 in Fedora 15 that is separate from the normal
flow to design artwork for GNOME 3. The GNOME artists are very friendly
and open to people getting involved. You can find them on #gnome-art and
#gnome-design on GimpNet.

Obviously, there's work to be done to coordinate the user experience for
GNOME 3 and Fedora and make it fit together - at every level from how
the websites interact on down. There's still a few months to make that
happen.

- Owen