Post F13 Fedora Design Team Status and First Meeting

Nicu Buculei and Martin Sourada gave a presentation about the Fedora Design team at this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting last week. (Slides available.) One of the most important points they shared about our team is our commitment to an open and inclusive process. We want folks to use open formats and collaborate in an open way, using open source tools, sharing sources and working together rather than in competition. An ongoing goal for the team is to get greater community participation in creating artwork for Fedora.

So how did the Fedora Design Team do for Fedora 13?

How’s that hopey, changeyopen-y, freedom-y thing working out for us? How did things go for the Fedora Design Team in Fedora 13?

• 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. He created the slick F13 small banner design that a lot of people have complimented!
• The main rocket launch banner for release day (shown above) was designed by Fabian Scherschel (new contributor!) of the Linux Outlaws podcast fame.
• Martha Benitez contributed additional media art (new contributor!)
• Nelson Marques contributed lightscribe media art designs (new contributor!)
• Tatica Leandro and myself designed the F13 release party poster.
• We got a lot of help from GNOME rockstars like Lapo Calamandrei, Hylke Bons, and Jakub Steiner on cleaning up a lot of the old Bluecurve icons in time for Fedora 13, and tracking down the correct replacement icon or in some cases creating new updated icons.See them all here! Our icons are looking better than ever…
• Hopefully I’m not forgetting anything or anybody but if I have let me know 🙂

All-in-all, we’ve done well for Fedora 13 – thanks to all our designer rockstars who pitched in!

Fedora Design Team Meetings

Of course, we can and will do better for Fedora 14. This week we had our first regular weekly team meeting on IRC. We’re hoping that having regular real-time meetings will make it easier for folks to participate and help us better work together. You can see the meeting bot minute minutes of our first meeting including the full log or read a condensed manual summary.
Are you interested in joining the Fedora Design Team, or just hanging out with us to see what we’re all about? You’re more than welcome to attend our meetings. Here are the details:

• Time: Every Tuesday at 7 PM UTC (3 PM ET, What’s this in your time zone?)
• Location: #fedora-design on irc.freenode.net
• Meeting minutes: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-design/

Hope to see you there!

Better Ways to Communicate?

As Kyle Baker illustrated a couple of weeks ago, it can be hard for a designer not familiar with open source communities and communication tools (IRC, mailing lists, etc.) to participate, and we might be losing out on a lot of awesome rockstar designers who believe in our mission and values but are too overwhelmed by the learning curve involved to simply communicate.
Ideally I’d like to see an interface like the rich mailman UI Luke Macken and I cooked up plans for, but in the meantime I discovered a few Drupal plugins that could serve as a fill-in before that UI gets developed:

If you’d like to try out following the Fedora Design Team mailing list using either the blog or forum (see screenshot above) views I set up for it, please let me know what you think! Here they are:

• Forum form factor for the Design Team list
• Blog form factor for the Design Team list

How did I set this up? Basically, you create an email address for your drupal install, subscribe it to the mailing list(s) you’d like to syndicate, and it uses the mailhandler and listhandler modules to process the incoming mails. There’s a way to set it up so it’ll send emails out from the blog comments / forum posts made in drupal as well, but I haven’t set that up yet. Here’s a couple of the tutorials I used as references in planning and setting it up (I don’t know anything about Drupal, I had never used it before, and it only took me a couple of hours to figure it out):

• HowTo: Integrate mailing lists with forums using Listhandler and Mailhandler
• Mailman + listhandler + mailhandler