more natural colors

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi Mike,

> On 12/12/06, Máirín Duffy <duffy at redhat.com> wrote:
>> I think a lot of the themes we've got proposed have natural-looking
>> palettes - a lot are focused on the night sky, with various shades of
>> light and deep blue.

Mike Chalmers wrote:
> The colors I speak of, are natural colors of pure life, trees and
> grass and earth. Not fire, metallic water, futuristic technological
> designs, lustful colors, metallic trees, stuff like that. Red Hat is
> definitely unnatural colors as is Fedora. I think if we think about it
> we can realize that, especially as artist.
> 
> Things like blue metallic water, for example, compared to regular blue
> water is incomparable. Or metallic silver trees compared to green leaf
> trees or leaves in the fall.

How about the blue night skies in some of our FC7 mockups?

> There is no way you can say the Red Hat's colors are natural if you
> think about it. You can't just name any color and say it is natural
> because it looks like red on trees. There is a big difference.

I'm not really following. I don't think it's fair to say the color red 
is unnatural in all cases so hopefully I am misunderstanding you there?

Certainly you can talk about a color's treatment in the context of a 
color palette or its usage in a piece of artwork as being unnatural or 
not. Even if you restate it in that way, however, I would still argue 
Red Hat's treatment of the color red is certainly not predominantly 
'unnatural'. Other words come to mind ('bold' since it's bright and 
attention-grabbing, 'different' as most tech companies go silver or 
blue) but I really can't say 'unnatural' comes to mind. Not that RH's 
graphic design is something we really have any say over in the Fedora 
art team :)

I think you may be on to some helpful critique here that we could apply 
to our FC7 artwork. To make an effective case here, however, and provide 
us with more useful feedback you really need to cite specific examples 
and qualify some of the statements you are making as they come across as 
somewhat vague to me. E.g., *which* Fedora artwork looks 'unnatural' to 
you? (provide links to screenshots or mockups) Why exactly? What parts 
of each piece communicate 'unnatural' to you?

> Fedora's colors remind me of the movies The Matrix.
> 
> I am not knocking Fedora, I love it. It just hurts me that the colors
> aren't used to a more natural earthy approach.

Mike, I think I'm understanding you a bit more but I wish you could 
provide more specific feedback. :)

What about the theme mockups I cited doesn't come across as natural to 
you? I'm really confused:

[1] 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fc7ThemeProposalFlyingHighPOC?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wallpaper-moonlight2.png

[2] 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fc7ThemeProposalFlyingHighPOC?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=flyinghigh-moonlight.png

[3]
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fc7ThemeProposalFedoraBorealis?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=fc7themeproposal-fedoraborealis-night2.png

Do you think any of these appears unnatural? Why, specifically? It can't 
just be the colors - there's a lot more that gives a piece of artwork 
its feel than the specific colors in it, you know? What does each one 
remind you of that isn't unnatural? Why?

Blue is a color that appears quite often in nature. If you would like to 
see themes that use a particular palette you like (you mention grass and 
earth a lot - green and brown - rather than the sky which is in fact 
blue when we are lucky :) ) then there's certainly nothing stopping you 
from taking some of the proposals we have on the table right now and 
experimenting with different color palettes in them. But I don't really 
think it's quite accurate to sweepingly judge all Fedora (and Red Hat 
for that matter) artwork as 'unnatural' based on the names of the colors 
involved rather than the treatment of the colors in them. Like I said 
above, it would be more fair to cite specific examples.

While the Fedora logo's colors won't be changing anytime soon, we can 
most certainly investigate non-blue options as far as the color palette 
for the theme artwork goes.

~m