Language is the OS that runs our thoughts

Interaction Design / Language / UncategorizedOne Comment

I think in tech, it’s really important to get as much inclusive language as we can nailed down as soon as we can. One trend I’ve seen as time has gone on is that we’re abstracting on top of abstractions further and further out. If we can clean up the base it’s all built on top of, that will hopefully mean a lot less issues moving forward as new abstractions need to be named / expressed in language. I have seen a lot of pushback against the suggestion that we actively fix some of the language in our code that could enforce old and problematic ideas. I want to talk about why these words are not so benign, and why changing them matters. Language is not a benign medium I think about language a lot – not just in working on the right terminology and phrasing for our software, which is a core part of my job as a UX designer. I also think about language from my experiences learning three languages beyond my mother tongue – Spanish, Japanese, and Irish – the latter, the language my ancestors were raised in. I would, under different circumstances, be living in Irish …

Resilience and trolls*

Design Team / Fedora / FLOSS / Suck13 Comments

Recently, two separate people called something myself and other Fedora Design Team members worked on “crap” and “shit” (respectively) on devel list, the busiest and most populous mailing list in the project. 💩💩💩 via GIPHY Actually, I’ve been around the internet a long time, and I have to say that this is an improvement in terms of the rudeness being applied towards the work specifically, and not the people! Progress! Yeah ok, but, we clearly still have a lot of work to do on basic decency. It’s not Fedora, it’s not the free and open source community, it’s not the internet – it’s people. Maybe people at a communication scale for which we’ve not quite evolved yet. Let’s talk about one way we can think about approaching this issue moving forward. (* I realize I used the term “trolls” in the title of this post, and I wouldn’t consider this scenario an intentional instance of trolling. However, this post is about a framework and not this specific scenario, so I use “trolls” as a more generic term.) What about the Code of Conduct? Codes of conduct set a baseline for expectations, and we certainly have one in Fedora. Well… I’m …

Return of the son of the panda badger

badges / Design Team / Fedora / SwagOne Comment

Personal Note: I haven’t blogged in a year! 😱 I’ve been gone for the past few months on leave, but I’ve been back for the past 3-4 weeks – no more excuses. Let’s just get back into things here! Design Team Issue: #579 Let’s bring back pandas! (sticker sheet request)   Here’s an initial mockup of a new sticker sheet design for Fedora! It features artwork from Fedora Badges. (Actually, now that I think of it, it would be nice to have a licensing notice for the artwork along the bottom or side of the sheet.) The idea behind this is just to be a fun piece of swag to give away at events. Before my leave, we produced a Fedora Diversity sticker sheet that has proven to be very popular at events, so it’s time for our panda and badger friends to have their time to shine I think 🙂   I could use feedback on the design. The magenta lines are the cutlines for the stickers – and they are very rough because I haven’t finalized them. (I’m using Inkscape’s dynamic offset feature to create them – I’m keeping them as dynamic offset paths for now so I …

Fedora logo redesign update

Fedora / Fedora Design Team / Logo Design101 Comments

As we’ve talked about here in a couple of posts now, the Fedora design team has been working on a refresh of the Fedora logo. I wanted to give an update on the progress of the project. We have received a lot of feedback on the design from blog comments, comments on the ticket, and through social media and chat. The direction of the design has been determined by that feedback, while also keeping in mind our goal of making this project a refresh / update and not a complete redesign. Where we left off Here are the candidates we left off with in the last blog post on this project: Candidate #1 Candidate #2 How we’ve iterated Here’s what we’ve worked on since presenting those two logo candidates, in detail. Candidate #2 Dropped Based on feedback, one of the first things we decided to do was to drop candidate #2 out of the running and focus on candidate #1. According to the feedback, candidate #1 is closer to the current logo. Again, a major goal was to to iterate what we had – keeping closer to our current logo seemed in keeping with that. Redesign of ‘a’ One of …

Which new Fedora logo design do you prefer?

Fedora / Fedora Design Team / Logo Design232 Comments

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Fedora design team has been working on a refresh of the Fedora logo. This work started in a Fedora design ticket at the request of the Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller, and has been discussed openly in the ticket, on the council list, on the design-team list, and within the Fedora Council including at their recent hackfest. In this post, I’d like to do the following: First, outline the history of our logo and how it got to where it is today. It’s important to understand the full context of the logo when analyzing it and considering change. I’d then like to talk about some of the challenges we’ve faced with the current iteration of our logo for the past few years, with some concrete examples. I want you to know there are solid and clear reasons why we need to iterate our logo – this isn’t something we’re doing for change’s sake. Finally, I’d like to present two proposals the Fedora Design Team has created for the next iteration of our logo – we would very much like to hear your feedback and understand what direction you’d prefer us to go …

Fedora Design Team Meeting, 4 Nollaig 2018

Design Team / Fedora / Fedora Design Team4 Comments

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 …

Intro to UX design for the ChRIS Project – Part 1

ChRIS / ChRIS / Interaction Design / Interaction Design Work / Intro to UX design for the ChRIS Project7 Comments

(This blog post is part of a series; view the full series page here.) What is ChRIS? Something I’ve been working on for a while now at Red Hat is a project we’re collaborating on with Boston Children’s Hospital, the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), and Boston University. It’s called the ChRIS Research Integration Service or just “ChRIS”. Rudolph Pienaar (Boston Children’s), Ata Turk (MOC), and Dan McPherson (Red Hat) gave a pretty detailed talk about ChRIS at the Red Hat Summit this past summer. A video of the full presentation is available, and it’s a great overview of why ChRIS is an important project, what it does, and how it works. To summarize the plot: ChRIS is an open source project that provides a cloud-based computing platform for the processing and sharing of medical imaging within and across hospitals and other sites. There’s a number of problems ChRIS seeks to solve that I’m pretty passionate about: Using technology in new ways for good.Where would we all be if we could divert just a little bit of the resources we in the tech community collectively put towards analyzing the habits of humans and delivering advertising content to them? ChRIS applies cloud …

Bíonn gach tosach lag*

Uncategorized3 Comments

Tá mé ag foghlaim Gaeilge; tá uaim scríobh postálacha blag as Gaeilge, ach níl mé oilte ar labhairt nó scríbh as Gaeilge go fóill. Tiocfaidh sé le tuilleadh cleachtaidh.** Catching up I have definitely fallen off the blog wagon; as you may or may not know the past year has been quite difficult for me personally, far beyond being an American living in Biff Tannen’s timeline these days. Blogging definitely was pushed to the bottom of the formidable stack I must balance but in hindsight I think the practice of writing is beneficial matter what it’s about so I will carve regular time out to do it. Tá mé ag foghlaim Gaeilge This post title and opening is in Irish; I am learning Irish and trying to immerse myself as much as one can outside of a Gaeltacht. There’s quite a few reasons for this: The most acute trigger is that I have been doing some genealogy and encountered family records written in Irish. I couldn’t recall enough of the class I’d taken while in college and got pulled in wanting to brush up. Language learning is really fun, and Irish is of course part of my heritage and I …

A follow up on Fedora 28's background art

artwork / Design Team / FedoraOne Comment

A quick post – I have a 4k higher-quality render of one of Fedora 28 background candidates mentioned in a recent post about the Fedora 28 background design process. Click on the image below to grab it if you would like to try / test it and hopefully give some feedback on it: One of the suggestions I’ve received from your feedback is to try to vary the height between the ‘f’ and the infinity symbol so they stand out. I’m hoping to find some time this week to figure out how exactly to do that (I’m a Blender newbie 😳), but if you want to try your hand, the Blender source file is available.

Fedora 28's Desktop Background Design

artwork / Design Team / Fedora7 Comments

Fedora 28 (F28) is slated to release in May 2018. On the Fedora Design Team, we’ve been thinking about the default background wallpaper for F28 since November. Let’s walk through the Fedora 28 background process thus far as a sort of pre-mortem; we’d love your feedback on where we’ve ended up. November: Inspiration As of the past 3 releases, we choose a sequential letter of the alphabet and come up with a list of scientists / mathematicians / technologists to serve as an inspiration for the desktop background’s visual concept: Backgrounds from Fedora 25, 26, and 27. 25’s inspiration was Archimedes, and the visual concept was an organic Archimedes’ screw. F26’s inspiration was Alexander Graham Bell, and the visual concept was a sound wave of a voice saying “Fedora.” F27’s inspiration was underwater researcher Jacques Cousteau, and the inspiration was transparency in the form of jellyfish. Gnokii kicked off the process in November by starting the list of D scientists for F28 and holding a vote on the team: we chose Emily Duncan, an early technologist who invented several types of banking calculators. December: First concepts We had a meeting in IRC (which I seem to have forgotten to run …