[Design-team] F15 wallpaper 0-day update

[Máirín Duffy]

On Wed, 2011-05-18 at 15:58 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:

> Still there's absolutely no need to go out of your way and design
> something completely different.

Actually there was, let me explain. I started working with Tatica's latest file
around 5 PM last night. I exported all the individual elements she and I
had created (we had worked together on the wallpaper before I left for
SXSW + Wedding + Honeymoon + Red Hat Summit) to fit a 1920x1200
wallpaper size, then I pulled them in as individual layers in the Gimp
and started styling them.

The problem is it is a very challenging composition. It got to be 1:00
AM, I was not making much progress. I was trying to fix the aurora
graphics that I'd done in the original SVG. I ended up taking some stock
smoke photographs, colorizing them, and trying to make them into a
nice-looking aurora. Since it was getting late and abstract compositions
are a lot easier and less-challenging, and since if we were going to do
a 0-zero day it really had to be done today (Wednesday), I stayed up
until 3 AM to style the auroras into an abstract wallpaper that could be
used.

If I had maybe 96 hours to work on it, absolutely I wouldn't have had to
'go out of my way' (except I really just worked with aurora designs,
which was actually on the way) to do something 'completely
different' (again, working with the original aurora layer from the current wallpaper.)

You can see the evolution in the XCFs and other files here (currently uploading):

http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/art/f15/2/

> Think of the message it would send.

Hopefully from the above you see where I am coming so I hope you can understand why I did
not think of any such thing.

> Plus I believe it would send the already half-dead (exaggeration)
> design team to the nether world (again exaggeration; "The desktop team
> does not care about us and now even our team leader does not care what
> we do, so why should we even bother doing anything?" <-- That would be
> the message it would send to at least some design team members). 

Our last team meeting was March 1. After that I had to take care of
SXSW, prepare for my wedding, get married, take a honeymoon, and then
work day & night in prep for the Red Hat Summit, then go to the Summit.
Understand this timeline first.

Now I want you to look at the log from that meeting:
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-design/2011-03-01/fedora-design.2011-03-01-20.00.html

Tatica worked her butt off. You can see from the log (and the ones
before it I am sure) that I helped her while I was here. Who helped her
while I was gone?

This is from March 3:
http://tatica.fedorapeople.org/Themes/F15/sky-background3.png

At this point I remember distinctly Tatica saying, again before I left,
that it wasn't finished and needed more polish, and I remember her
mentioning polish ideas that don't look like they were applied in the
final product. I didn't think then that she would disagree with a
last-ditch effort to apply polish for F15.

The goal here is to collaborate and work together using free software
tools to make Fedora look great. The goal is not to enact a conspiracy,
hurt anyone's feelings, or disrespect anyone's work. I would have
thought coming from me, this would have gone without saying, and I'm
hurt and confused as to why so many have interpreted this effort so
very differently.

> Please don't take it offensively, I just don't feel that throwing >
something - that was already done and that will be present on every >
Fedora 15 Review that does feature other than gnome desktops - out is >
the way to go, irrespective of what change in quality it delivers. 

I feel as if there's a lot more respect here for process than the
outcome of the process. In the end how much does it matter that reviews
show a different wallpaper? Are reviewers more important than Fedora
users?

> As I
> already said, if you feel there's something wrong with current
> wallpaper quality (I said what I think could be improved some months
> ago, but sadly I have neither the HW power nor skills to improve that
> myself), focus on how to fix it without changing the general design.
> The supposed updated wallpaper should look at first glance very similar
> to what we have now.

You can see from the above how I attempted this.

~m