[Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi Martin,

On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 22:28 +0100, Martin Sourada wrote:
> IMHO this would lessen Fedora's visual identity a lot. Imagine you boot
> a F15 Desktop Live and what you see is almost pristine GNOME 3 desktop.
> Where's Fedora in it? Where's our own visual identity in it?

Our visual identity would (if the proposal is accepted) be present on
the website, on the DVD disc labels and sleeves, in syslinux, in the
installer, in firstboot, in plymouth, and on the login screen. The
wallpaper we design will be the default for GDM. 

>  Moreover,
> KDE shipped our wallpaper with the 4.0 release, why should we treat
> GNOME differently? Is it some new trend?

I honestly don't remember the KDE SIG ever approaching us with this
request. And honestly why would they? - they aren't the default
download, so it's not up to this team, it's up to the KDE SIG what to
do. This team, the design team, has purview over the default wallpaper
in the default Fedora. Spins have always been able to change their
wallpapers as they've liked, and we've even designed alternative
wallpapers for them at their request (e.g., Education Spin and Security
Spin.) 

> OK, so upstream wants to promote GNOME 3. I'm not a fan of gnome-shell
> (quite the contrary), but let them do it. But why the visual identity?
> It's the behaviour, the work-flow, the experience that makes GNOME 3
> from end-user point of view, and it's the visual identity that makes our
> distro Fedora from end-user POV (among other things, but the visual
> identity is the first thing you see).

They believe the stripes is part of their upstream visual identity. To
be fair, they are producing a lot of nice visual materials including
videos that have the stripes - because as a DE they must remain neutral
wrt distros, so they obviously cannot pick a favorite in choosing a
wallpaper. They would like the visual identity then across
GNOME-produced materials and Fedora materials and materials produced by
journalists and other reviewers checking out GNOME 3 via Fedora to be
consistent. This makes sense to me. After F15, it won't be as big a deal
since all the hooplah will be over, so at that point we can go back to
the standard operating procedure.

> So in short, let's be *first* to ship GNOME 3 and let's be *first* to
> ship it with our own visual identity. We, the fedora design team, should
> be leaders in our area as well ;-)

I am unsure if we will be the first to ship GNOME 3. Certainly we will
be first to ship it by default. I don't understand how we are being
leaders in what you suggest here.

~m