[Design-team] Hello! I'm new here :)

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi Katie!

Welcome to the design team! We have meetings weekly on Thursdays at 2 PM
US Eastern (I think that is 1800 UTC) in #fedora-design on
irc.freenode.net and you are more than welcome to come and meet
everybody live then.

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 14:19 -0400, niftyness wrote:
> Having worked as a teacher and as an insider in the training business,
> I am highly skilled at formatting instructional materials.

Ooh, very cool. We have a small (but growing) repository of how-tos so
folks on the team can try their hand at different tasks; that repository
is here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design#How_Tos

Any thoughts you have around reformatting those for better learnability
would be really valuable!

> Things I can do:
> Animation, info graphics, interface design concepts, branding
> materials, style guides, video production, electronic communications..
> and more!
> 
> My training is geared towards Graphic Design AND Interactive Design --
> This means that I can do print work AND digital work.

Cool we need *all* of that :) Some major projects we're working on now:

- Elad and I have been working on Fedora's installer UX overhaul
( http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2011/06/16/making-fedora-easier-to-use-the-installer-ux-redesign/ )
- Kirk is working on a usability evaluation of ABRT
(https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/180 )
- Gnokii, Buddhika, Suchakra, Tatica, and others have been working on
the graphics for three different Fedora FUDcon events: FUDcon Milan,
FUDcon Pune, FUDcon Blacksburg - this includes logo, poster, and t-shirt
design
- Fedora 16 finalizing artwork (this is in the finishing stages)
- Fedora 17 artwork planning (will be ramping up in a month or two)
> 
> Currently, I have an OLPC XO with Fedora/Sugar (default system specs)
> and a dual-boot windows machine (Win 7 + Ubuntu 11).

Any chance we can convince you to 'upgrade' to Fedora on the Ubuntu
system? :)

> My primary goal with regards to this community is to create wonderful
> artwork using Open Source software. Whilst I am highly adept at using
> Adobe products, they are simply not an economically viable solution
> for an independent digital artist such as myself.

Sounds great! Some of the main tools we use are:

Gimp (Luya has a repo at repos.fedorapeople.org that has the latest
development version of gimp for single-window mode goodness!)
Inkscape
MyPaint
Blender
Scribus
> 
> In addition to creating assets for the fedora project, I am also
> interested in promoting fedora to a wider audience -- A deviantArt
> group would be an excellent way to promote our work to a community of
> highly talented artists who otherwise might not have known of fedora's
> existence (I've read the wiki). I've been a fan/user of deviantArt for
> almost a decade now, and it has proven itself to be an absolutely
> fantastic community to work with.

Cool, that sounds like a good idea. We have a process where we have
folks submit their photography to be included as wallpapers in Fedora
[1], and over at least the past couple of releases we've advertised it
across the free software-related dA groups and have had some good
success in getting high-quality submissions. It would be nice to find
free software artists on dA and try to recruit them to join us as well
but we've never really had a concerted effort to do so beyond wallpaper
submissions.

We've never had an official Fedora deviant art group; mainly because dA
is sadly not open source software. We could talk about that and discuss
if maybe it makes sense to just go ahead and set one up anyway. We did
set up an artboard for our default wallpaper process using free software
but of course it doesn't have the huge community around it that dA does:
http://publictest04.fedoraproject.org/artboard/

~m

[1]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_manage_the_supplemental_wallpaper_process