Getting covers printed

[Max Spevack]

Let me throw in my two cents about the actual mechanics of turning 
artwork on the wiki into tangible product.

Mostly, we want to give people *anywhere in the world* the tools they 
need to produce CDs and/or sleeves with artwork that has been "blessed" 
and approved by the Fedora Art team.

The process of doing this for North America tends to get noticed the 
most, simply because we usually make thousands of disks, and I've been 
the guy who's done it the last few times.

Let's look at the provider history in North America:

Fedora Core 5 -- Brand Fuel, the people who make all our other swag. 
The disks looked good, but cost about double what the general market 
charged.  So we stopped using them for media.

Fedora Core 6 -- SF Video, a company that is based out of San Francisco 
that Jack made contact with at LinuxWorld a few years ago.  They did a 
good job, but it took a bit longer than we had hoped, mostly due to 
distance issues.

Fedora 7 -- Double Data, a local company here in Raleigh.  Color 
matching issues, everyone was disappointed, but they vowed to "get it 
right" if we gave them another chance.  Also part of the problem here 
was that the artist who did the Fedora 7 theme left without making the 
CD art, and everything was thrown together in a panic at the last 
minute.  So best to just forget about this release.

Fedora 8 -- We gave DD another chance, and they worked really hard to 
get the color matching right.  I think that everyone who saw the end 
products of Fedora 8 agreed that the sleeves and disks all looked great. 
However, there was a *ton* of back and forth between their production 
folks and Mo, and it was a pretty frustrating experience for her, I 
imagine.  The end result, however, was excellent, I haven't heard a 
single complaint about the final product of Fedora 8.

Fedora 9 -- I was inclined to give our business to Double Data once 
again, because they *kept* all of the work that they did for color 
matching in the F8 period, and I think that the process this time ought 
to go more smoothly.  Regrettably, there's going to be some back and 
forth between *any* production company and the Fedora Art Team, but I 
want to make Mo's life as easy as possible.

So I look to you all for guidance....

I'm here to try to take your artwork and turn it into a physical media 
that can be distributed all over the world, not to make your lives more 
difficult

I love the Fedora Art Team, you all know that.  ;)

--Max