Fedora Design Team Meeting, 4 Nollaig 2018

Today we had a Fedora Design Team meeting. Here’s what went down (meetbot link).

Freenode<>Matrix.org Issues

About half of the team members who participated today used matrix.org (e.g. the riot.im client). Unfortunately, we noticed an issue with bridging between these two networks today – both sides could see IRC comments, but matrix.org comments weren’t getting sent to IRC. ctmartin recognized the issue from another Fedora channel and figured out that if we added +v to the channel members using matrix, that would fix the issue. I am not sure if this is All Fixed Now or is going to be an ongoing Thing. But that is why our meeting started late today.

If anybody has ideas on how to resolve this in a permanent way, I would very much appreciate your advice!

Fedora 30 Artwork

For 5 Fedora releases now, the design team has been using a famous scientist / mathematician / technologist as the inspiration for the release artwork. We do this based on an alphabetical system; Fedora 30 is slated to be a person whose names begins with an “F.” Gnokii manages this process, and already set up and tallied the results for the design team-specific vote on which we chose from the following:

• Federico Faggin (microprocessor)
• Rosalin Franklin (DNA helix)
• Sandford Fleming (Universal Standard Time)
• Augustin-Jean Fresnel (fresnel lens)

As gnokii announced on our team mailing list, the inspiration for the Fedora 30 artwork will be Augustin-Jean Fresnel. He also gathered the following set of inspirational images, which all revolve around the design of the Fresnel lens, which we talked about in the meeting would be a good central focus / concept for the artwork, whether it’s a depiction of a lens itself or some form of study of the diffraction pattern (and “thin-film” rainbow effect”) that inspired its invention:

• blue fresnel lens light with smoke
• Fresnel Lens HD Wallpaper
• Cape Canaveral Fresnel Lens
• Blue Cubes abstract wallpaper

The action item we got out of this discussion is that we need to meet separately, a remote hackfest if you will, to work on the F30 artwork (as we typically do each release.) This will take place in #fedora-design on IRC (or Fedora Design on matrix.org.) If you are interested in participating, here is the whenisgood.net to organize a time for this event:

http://whenisgood.net/79qzs5s

Exploring a Fedora logo refresh

For the past few weeks we have been working with mattdm on exploring what a refresh of the Fedora logo might look like. This work has been ongoing in design ticket #620. There’s a few issues such a thing would aim to address – if you’ve ever worked with the current Fedora logo yourself, these should be pretty familiar (copy-pasta-ed from the ticket):

• It doesn’t work well at small sizes
• It doesn’t work at all in a single color
• It’s hard to work with on a dark background
• The “voice” bubble means it’s hard to center visually in designs
• The Fedora wordmark is based on a non-open-source font
• The “a” in the wordmark is easily mistaken for an o
• The horizontal wordmark + logo with the “floated” trailing logo is challenging to work with

The general approach here is a light touch, and not an overhaul. Below are some of the leading concepts / experiments thus far:

The next step here that we discussed is for each concept, to create something like “style tiles” for each so we can better understand how each would play in context – how would it look like with our fonts, color palette, and what design elements would go with it. That process may surface some issues in the design of each which we’ll need to address.

After that, we’ll open up to broad community input – maybe a formal survey and/or maybe some mini IRC or video chat focus group sessions and see how folks feel about it, gather feedback, see which concept the broader community prefers and see if there are tweaks / adjustments we can make to iterate it based on the feedback we receive.

This is something we’ll continue to work on for the next few months. If you have feedback on the assets so far, please feel free to leave it in the comments here, but be nice please 🙂 and note this is still early stages.

Are you new to Fedora Design? Would you like to join?

Fedora Podcast Website Design

terezahl, the Fedora Design team intern, has been working on a website design for the Fedora Podcast that x3mboy has created. She showed us a snapshot of her work-in-progress, and we gave her some feedback. Overall, it looks great, and we’re excited to see where it goes 🙂

That’s it folks!

If you are interested in participating in the Fedora 30 Artwork IRC Hackfest, please vote for a timeslot here, ASAP 🙂

http://whenisgood.net/79qzs5s