Fedora Design Bounty: 'Fedora Students Contributing' T-Shirt

The Fedora Design Team Bi-weekly Bounty is a bi-weekly (well, at least monthly! 😉 ) blog post where we’ll outline a quick-and-easy design project that needs doing for the Fedora Community, outlining all the tools, files, and other resources you’ll need to complete the project. If you’re a designer and are interested in getting involved in the free and open source community, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet!

‘Fedora Students Contributing’ T-Shirt Design

The Fedora Students Contributing program (the artist formerly known ‘Fedora Summer Coding’) is a program sponsored by Red Hat, JBoss, and Indifex to sponsor university students to contribute to Fedora-related free software projects during a summer break. The program hooks these students up with experienced mentors to show them the ropes and get some awesome projects done. For example, Christopher Antila put together a totally rockin’ Fedora Musicians’ Guide, and Aditya Patawari put together a KDE-based Fedora Netbook spin. See the full list of awesome students & projects here.
What we need is an awesome T-shirt to commemorate and celebrate the students’ accomplishments, for this past summer and for future Fedora summer programs like this. The shirts will be given out to the students, their mentors, and the sponsors of the program.

Your Mission

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a street-wearable, stylish T-shirt for folks involved with the Fedora Students Contributing project. This T-shirt should be something these folks can wear proudly, and it would be totally cool if it was a design eye-catching enough to elicit questions from passers-by, “Where did you get that T-shirt?” or “What’s Fedora?” I’m hoping it will open up the way for a conversation to share what Fedora is and what it’s about.

Tips

I’ve put together a page on the Fedora wiki outlining the requirements of this project, providing the general guidelines, a base template you can open up and use to start designing with, and even some inspiration in the form of past Fedora T-Shirt designs and some cool T-Shirt shops online. You’ll be starting out with a basic T-shirt template (courtesy of Nicu Buculei, so you can start sketching within a nice template right away!

Helpful Tools

• Inkscape – You may install it on Fedora using ‘yum install inkscape’ or by searching for it in PackageKit. If you are not using Fedora, you can download it here. You’ll need Inkscape to work with the T-shirt template.
• Scribus – You may install it on Fedora using ‘yum install scribus’ or by searching for it in PackageKit. If you are not using Fedora, you can download it here. Scribus is going to helpful for you to prepare your final design for printing.

Helpful Resources

• Fedora Students Contributing T-Shirt Design Wiki Page on the Fedora Wiki chock full o’ requirements and inspiration for you, and first steps in getting started on this project!
• A basic tutorial on using Inkscape to create a T-shirt design – this has the basics – but I hope your design will be even better than the example in the tutorial!
• The Fedora Design Team: please drop by #fedora-design on irc.freenode.net for any assistance! (Join our chat on the web here. Or join and drop an email to our mailing list.)

What’s in it for you?

Okay, okay, we get it. You’re a designer or a T-shirt connoisseur, and you’ve got things to do – why would you bother helping out with this? Let’s do a quick run-down of what’s in it for you:

• If you don’t already have it, you’ll get membership into the Fedora Design Team, which includes Fedora voting privileges and hosting space for Fedora-related projects.
• For your personal portfolio you’ll have a screen-printed T-shirt that will be distributed to students, mentors, and sponsor companies, for the 2010 project and for future years as well!
• We’ll mail you your very own screen-printed T-shirt based on your design – that’s right, if someone on the street asks you “Where did you get that shirt??!?” you can respond, “Oh, it’s from my own personal line. I designed it!”
• You’ll build skills in using Inkscape and Scribus – these are excellent free & open source tools that are worth learning because you can use them for just about any design project in the future and they are free forever. You’ll also build skills in addressing general layout challenges, and preparing designs for professional screen-printing.
• I will send you a thank you card, a full-color copy of your design, and some Fedora swag in thanks for your help!
• You’ll gain experience in contributing to a free/open source project.
• Bragging rights as a free/open source project design ninja & more importantly a Fedora Design Team Bi-weekly Bounty designer!

You’re completely raring to go and totally psyched, right? Sweet! So where to start?

Ninja by Hector Gomez from openclipart.org – Public Domain.

The Rules

• You’ll need a Fedora account to submit your work. Don’t worry, it’s not hard to get, you can sign up for it here, quickly and painlessly: Create a Fedora account. Once you’ve created your account, log in to sign the contributor license agreement (this gives us permission to use your work!)
• If you are interested in taking this bounty on please make a comment to this blog post below. The first person to claim it in the comments will have exactly 48 hours to give it a shot, at the end of which the bounty will be opened up for someone else (you can try to re-claim it if you want.) I will announce all status changes in the comments.
• You must provide source files for your work. This is so we can make any necessary edits or provide translations for the document, create a reusable template out of your awesome deign, or just generally learn from how your design works. If you’re working with Inkscape and Scribus, this means we need the Inkscape SVG file(s), the Scribus SLA file(s), and any other graphics you may be incorporating into it. If you use any graphics you didn’t create yourself, you’ll need to keep track of where you got them from and the license and let use know.
• You’ll need to abide by the Fedora brand guidelines – but please don’t let this stifle any awesome creative and innovative ideas you might have – just check in with your Fedora design team compatriots first. 🙂 More information and pointers to resources on our branding guidelines is available on the Fedora wiki.
• When you’re ready to submit your work, send it to me!. If you need help please email me (duffy at fedoraproject dot org) or pop into IRC!

Good luck!