FWN/Beats/Design

Design

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Icon Design

When Bryan Nielsen, as a new contributor, tried his hand at a first task "I was looking for a simple ticket item that I could tackle and ticket #99 does not have an owner and looked like something I could handle", Jakub Steiner, the team's guru in icon design, stepped in with useful advices "Indeed, the workflow goes like this - create the highres, scale it down for 48x48, remove all the detail that won't render. Get rid of all the mask tricks, put 1px strokes in place. Make sure everything snaps to the pixel grid (snap to bounding box in inkscape). Once 48x48 is down, repeat for smaller sizes. Once done, edit the icon name and context in the baseplate layer, hide the baseplate layer and render the icon with ./render-icon-theme.py icon-name" and after a number of iterations Bryan achieved a good result.

Release Graphics

Media artwork (CD/DVD sleeves and labels) are one of the lasts items needing to be done before the Fedora 14 release so Alexander Smirnov proposed a design "It's my proposal for create DVD/CD sleeve artwork. This concept based on our new branding font Comfortaa and Cantarel." After a suggestion by Máirín Duffy he removed the GNOME logo and improved the text layout. Alexander even created physical products and provided photos "I created real sleeve for preview (photo from my mobile phone)." Marc Stewart built his own version on Alexander's layout "I am indebted to Alexander for posting his designs. Up until a few hours ago, I felt there was something missing from mine, and have shamelessly stolen the overlay and front logo, and moved the front details from the bottom-left over to the right as a consequence of incorporating these elements."

Alexander Smirnov also created the countdown banner for the Fedora 14 release "I ended make translate version my countdown banner" and Máirín Duffy forwarded it to the websites list.

Installing the Design Suite

Following an user question "I've already got Fedora installed. How do I add the Suite to the existing platform", Máirín Duffy suggested a long yum command "yum install agave blender entangle fontforge fontmatrix gimp gimp-*-plugin GREYCstoration-gimp mathmap inkscape mypaint nautilus-image-converter optipng rawtherapee scribus shotwell synfigstudio ufraw xournal jokosher pitivi gtk-recordmydesktop", Nicu Buculei asked for a group/comp "Maybe we should look intro providing a: yum groupinstall design-suite", Gianluca Sforna offered his help "I could help with the 'comps' part (e.g. actually creating the package group) if needed, then you may just add @design-tools in the kickstart file" while Ankur Sinha proposed "Would it be overkill to just create a meta package that pulls in these packages as dependencies? 'yum install design-suite' will then install them all?"

A Design FAD in 2011?

Henrik Heigl advanced the idea of a Design FAD (Fedora Activity Day) "for quite a while there is an idea in the head of some of the Design-Team members to get together for a FAD. As far as I know Design-team had not something like it IRL, so the idea came up to put something together near the next LGM [Libre Graphics Meeting] in Montreal. That would be the weekend May 7-8 or better 14-15 depending on how much we want to do this weekend."

Free Media Mailer

Ankur Sinha requested an improved envelope design "Can someone please make a mailer that the free media program could use to send it's media in? We already have one[1], but it isn't very generic" and following an indication from Máirín Duffy made a proper ticket. Nicu Buculei suggested better visibility for the request "How about turning this into a bounty item?", Marc Stewart showed the work he did "Since I'd already started drawing up the basic framework, I've turned it into a template, including some useful resources on a separate layer" and Onyeibo Oku accepted the ticket "I took interest in this task being a member of the Free-media as well. So, I accepted the ticket. Looks much similar to a design I did before ... which was of no consequence."