Fedora Design Team Sessions Live: Session #1

As announced in the Fedora Community Blog, today we had our inaugural Fedora Design Team Live Session 🙂
Thanks for everyone who joined! I lost count at how many folks we had participate, we had at least 9 and we had a very productive F35 wallpaper brainstorming session!

Here’s a quick recap:

1. fedora.element.io background image thumbnail sketches review

Ticket: https://pagure.io/design/issue/705

We took a look at Madeline’s thumbnail sketches for the upcoming Fedora
element.io deployment.

– We looked at Mozilla’s login screen to see what they did:
mozilla.element.io.
-I gave a little background on the project and the concept of the
initial thumbnail sketch i did with lights: the gist is users joining
the chat server are in the dark foreground approaching this glowing city
full of communication / vitality, and the shape/glow of the buildings
skyline is meant to evoke the shape of a sound wave of a voice.
– Madeline talked us through her 4 thumbnail sketches and their concepts
– she made some refinements to the glowing city concept, and also riffed
off of the idea with the neat buildings hanging together with the water
reflection and clouds (the chat is in the cloud!), and the natural/calm
vibe of looking up through the trees
-We all pretty much enjoyed all of them and there was no clear favorite.
– One point that was brought up is that the login dialog will be in the
center of the image so Madeline noted that her final design will need to
work well with a dialog of unknown size floating over top it.
– The thumbnail idea with the trees relates to the F34 wallpaper which
we discussed next.

2. F34 Wallpaper WIP

Ticket: https://pagure.io/design/issue/688

– The basic background here is that we’re going for a calm, tranquil
image as a counter to the craziness that has been the past year or so
with the pandemic and other stuff going on. The inspiration here was Ub
Iwerks who invented the multiplane camera so the key element of this
image/composition is the built in layered effect. The technique is meant
to be watercolor-style, and watercolor as a medium heavily relies on
layering itself
– Marie noticed a halo behind the tree on the left, it stands out too
much so I’ll adjust it
– Neal noted we should package up *something* for the night version for
beta if we intend to have time of day wallpaper even if it’s rough, it’s
better than nothing.

3. F35 Brainstorm

Ticket: https://pagure.io/design/issue/707

I wrote up a summary in the ticket, but essentially we did a
collaborative mindmap, dropping links to images and coming up with
related ideas, basically creating a big map of brain food to keep
building ideas. Next steps are to do some sketches based on the 4 sort
of themes that shook out of the mind map exercise.

Tech notes for future sessions:

• Need to update the join link:
  The link I put on the community blog and here to join dumped folks
  straight to Jitsi without the Matrix chat. Next time we should just use
  the Matrix chat as the main link to join, because the Jitsi window
  doesn’t have a separate chat for link dumping so we need to use the
  Matrix chat for that.
• Jitsi does not have built-in recording so the session wasn’t recorded.
  It’s my understanding it’s possible to record using OBS, so I will try that next session.

I can’t think of anything else. Feel free to reply here if there’s
something I forgot or if you had some technical or format issues / ideas
/ feedback to make our next session better.

Thanks again to everyone who joined in 🙂 I had a blast!