Artwork conversations

[Nicu Buculei]

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 
> I'm not going to reply to the many long emails in this conversation
> in detail, but I'd like to respond to this quote, which I think is
> indicative of some of the misunderstandings that have happened:
> 
> "[all we can do is] sit back and each 6 months when a new version is
> released act as fanboys and worship the great powers that brought us the
> graphics"
> 
> No, not at all. Instead find a channel to get your art in people's
> hands. 

That was my quote and I exaggerated a bit to make my point clearer. Of 
course I have an alternative channel, my personal website have a section 
with various Fedora artwork and it receive a healthy amount of traffic 
and noticeable search engine rankings [1].
Of course the default matters but I also think some alternative channel 
should be *inside* the project, otherwise it may be considered a fork 
and I think forking the community should be done only as the last resort.

> Focusing narrowly on the default, branded theme that ships with the next
> Fedora release is probably not the best way to achieve that. Also,
> striving for the overarching, unified experience "from cradle to grave"
> or rather from anaconda to background makes it much harder than it has
> to be. Many of the pieces of a "full branding kit" are seen only once
> (if at all) by our users (anaconda, firstboot, etc). On the flip side,
> the parts that people see all the time on their desktops (gtk theme,
> window manager theme, background, icons) are easy to package up and get
> into Fedora as a standalone package. 

In my opinion, and I don't talk now the first time about it, the holy 
grail is something like "Background Channels" [2], allowing anyone to 
publish and anyone to use and I think such a service should be hosted by 
Fedora. In the past I even suggested ccHost [3] as an engine for serving 
such content.

> Another point is that almost all the proposals that have been discussed
> on this list are heavily branded. The heavy branding in FC5 (and to a
> lesser extent, FC6) was necessary to introduce the new Fedora logo.
> But I think that longer-term, it would be much better to produce themes
> that are less branded and can stand on their own because of their
> quality as a theme, not because they have the necessary branding to
> become the default Fedora theme. And we could really use more
> high-quality non-branded themes, e.g. to make it easier for those who
> create derived distributions and need to strip out the Fedora branding.

Yes, all the proposals are heavily branded but at the same time it seems 
the majority of contributors agree about reducing branding.
What can I see about derived distributions? The large majority of the 
proposals (not the "winning" one) have available the source code as SVG, 
so is easy to customize and remove branding.
Also, I would *love* to see makers of the derived distros coming to the 
list and asking for customized graphics.
But the ultimate form of the branding is not the logo usage but the 
usage of the Fedora blue, so my feeling is that a derived distro should 
better use a completely revamped theme for a strong identity.


[1] - 
http://picasaweb.google.com/nicubunu/Screenshots/photo#5033134774425278466
http://picasaweb.google.com/nicubunu/Screenshots/photo#5033134774425278482
[2] - http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/blog/GNOME/background_channels
[3] -http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcHost

-- 
nicu
Cool Fedora wallpapers: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/wallpapers/
Open Clip Art Library: http://www.openclipart.org
my Fedora stuff: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro