[Design-team] Fedora Project Board Design Team Status Meeting [Fwd: Fedora Board Recap 2010-05-20]

Fri May 21 19:33:05 UTC 2010

I haven't had much time to contribute, however I would be more than happy on
helping people ramp up on open source tool via irc.

--pcon

Ps thanks to everyone that did a wonderful job with f13

On May 21, 2010 3:23 PM, "Máirín Duffy" <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

Hello my design rockstar colleagues,

Yesterday I was invited to represent our team at a public Fedora Board
meeting. In the past couple weeks or so the Board has been setting up
meetings with Fedora team representatives, to provide updates on what
their team has been working on both for F13 and outside of the release,
and to talk about the team's future plans and any ways the Board can
help.

The log from that meeting is here:
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-board-meeting/2010-05-20/fedora_board.2010-05-20-16.01.log.html

I'd like to give you a summary:

OUR STATUS ==========

One of our ongoing goals is to get greater community participation in
creating the release artwork for Fedora. For F13 we've done quite well.

We were able to have artwork checked in the Alpha, the earliest yet.
We also had wide participation on the artwork, perhaps the widest yet:

- We worked together on a single concept for the wallpaper rather than
battling each other, so we had a cooperative and collaborative process
for F13. Many, many folks were involved in the ideation and rendering
process for the wallpaper, including Luya Tshimbalanga, Charlie Brej,
Mel Chua, Samuele Storari, Mola Pahnadayan, and Kyle Baker (new
contributor!)

- Alexander Smirnov rocked the house with both the small release banner
designs, countdown banners, and media artwork

- The main banner for release day was designed by Fabian Scherschel (new
contributor!)

- Martha Benitez contributed additional media art (new contributor!)

- Nelson Marques contributed light scribe media art designs (new
contributor!)

- Tatica Leandro and myself designed the release party poster

- I did only the firstboot and anaconda splashes on my own!

Of course we can always improve and of course we can always use more
contributors but I think we did ourselves pretty proud this
release, so congrats everybody!!!

OUR FUTURE ==========

I think you'll agree our biggest challenges for the future are:

- retaining our current talent
- recruiting more talent
- continuing to pump out awesome artwork using FLOSS tools,
 improving our reputation.
- spreading the usage of FLOSS creative tools and assets!

Recently Red Hat hired an extremely talented new visual designer, Kyle
Baker, who you've met here on the list before. Kyle's background is in
design - he does not have a technical background - and his experience is
from using Adobe products (as much as we hate it, the current industry
standard.) However, Kyle is excited to be contributing to free & open
source software and is interested in converting over to the FLOSS design
tools that we use - so he is highly motivated to make the jump.

That being said, through the process of trying to get him set up to join
in our community and start contributing to some of the things that we
do, we've gained a fresh perspective on just how hard it is for talented
folks who really want to help our cause but have the technical chops of
a designer. Actually, I think Kyle has a lot more tech knowledge than a
lot of typical designers.

With the Board then I brought up the three challenges designers face in
trying to join our team:

1 - Most designers are familiar with the Adobe tools. Our tools are
foreign to them and will take time to ramp up on.

2 - Open source and free licensing, especially for imagery/content and
fonts, is complicated. Designers need to understand the licenses we work
with in order to contribute effectively.

3 - The workflow we follow and the tools we use to collaborate are
foreign to most designers. Initial setup is the most difficult - ssh
keys, learning trac, learning mediawiki, learning how to use a mailing
list, IRC, sshing into fedorapeople.org to make a .planet file, mounting
our shared drive on fedorapeopleorg - each one is not too bad on its
own, but pile them up together and you have a mess.

We don't have any choice on #2.... we have a little bit of wiggle room
with #1 on how strict we decide to be. #3, however, seems like it hurts
all of us to no good end and it seems to be something maybe we as a
community could solve.

The bulk of the log with the Board is discussion of these problems and
how we might solve them. Kyle and I had a brainstorming session on this
yesterday morning; we were thinking maybe some kind of single webui
front end to some of the tools we already use might help alleviate the
problem.

Kyle just posted an awesome blog post on our ideas to Planet Fedora
today, check it out here:
http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/kybaker/2010/05/21/creative-open-sorcery/

What do you think? Ideas? Critique? Rants? :)

~m

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com>
Reply-to: advisory-board at lists.fedoraproject.org
To: Fedora Advisory Board <advisory-board at lists.fedoraproject.org>
Subject: Fedora Board Recap 2010-05-20
Date: Thu, 20 May 2010 13:18:33 -0400

The full IRC log for the Board's IRC meeting can be found here:

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-board-meeting/2010-05-20/fedora_board.2010-05-20-16.01.log.html

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