A pretty please (regrading Fedora 9 theme)

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Dec 30, 2007 2:09 PM, Valent Turkovic <valent.turkovic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here are one audio review which also says artwork for Fedora 8 is lacking:
> http://kernelreloaded.blog385.com/index.php/archives/fedora-8-audio-review/
>
> and one random forum comment:
> "Artwork quite poor compared to version 7."
> http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=43139#p43139


Valent, dragging out points of view concerning personal taste
concerning artwork is frankly just pointless. And I personally think
it undermines what you actually want to accomplish.
On matters of style you simply will not please everyone. You can't.
You have to have a specific design goal in mind and stick with it.
Just saying i want something bold or a i want something more abstract
doesn't really mean anything, you aren't convincing anyone to change
their minds because you aren't presenting a compelling design focus by
just stating an opinion about what style you would prefer.

Why is bold better exactly? Certainly from a usability standpoint a
bold artistic design is a horrible horrible idea.  Bold or busy
default desktop backgrounds take the focus away from other things on
the desktop and make it harder to visually locate desktop icons and
associated text for some people. In that sense the F8 desktop
background was actually better than previous default backgrounds
exactly because it was relatively 'bland' and stayed out of the way.
The default F8 desktop background does exactly what it's asked to
do...be in the background.

Was F8's artwork distinctive? Unquestionably yes.  It's not confusable
with previous Fedora releases of recent vintage and its not confusing
with other Linux distributions of note, nor major proprietary OS
systems that would be running on the same hardware.  Since there is no
we can artistically please everyone, we must be content with being
distinctive.

On top of that, I think the subtle visual nature is perfect for a
first experiment with the time-based rotation technology that was
introduced in nautilus.  The new time-changing colorscape of the
wallpaper becomes the major visual focus because the image itself is
spartan.   I'm fine with that.  F7's photorealistic balloons would
have been much harder to rotate and look attractive.  The same with
F6's glassy rendered DNA strands.

That being said, i think this time around it would be good to be less
subtle in an effort to make sure F8 is distinctive from F9.  I think
cel-shading of 3-D rendered version of one of the Freedom draft
sketchs might strike a reasonable balance, the cel-shading would
provide a bit 'bolder' visual look but it would not be as visually
'noisy' as the photo-releastic F7 balloons, nor a repeat of the
glassy/plasticy-rendered 3-D DNA theme and you could still use a time
based rotation technology.


-jef"How many people would buy a Toyota Prius, if all of them came
standard with eye-popping flaming skull decals on the hood and side
panels? Sometimes understated is exactly the default paint job you
want."spaleta