Artwork Quality (was Re: Sound themes)

[Andreas Nilsson]

Mairin Duffy wrote:
> William Jon McCann wrote:
>> I think a lot of the responsibility is on the desktop team (and also
>> the upstream community) to communicate more effectively. 
> What do you mean by upstream? You mean the Fedora Artwork team is the 
> upstream for the Fedora-branded artwork, right?
>
> I think the GNOME art team upstream, at least, accepts and understands 
> that individual distros will impose their own branding on their 
> desktops, and I don't think there is any issue with that. (Andreas, I 
> won't put any words in your mouth but I remember we'd discussed this 
> at the GNOME usability summit not long ago.)
We know upstream that this happens and for stuff like backgrounds it 
doesn't really matter I think (hence why it completely blew my mind that 
some people got upset by the background decision [1], since the only 
people who will see that one is the few people who compile GNOME 
themselves).
gnome-backgrounds is a nice little package with  some cool stuff in it, 
but I'm confident that most people will replace their background with a 
crappy pic of their dog or whatever anyway. Backgrounds are also 
relatively cheap to produce and is highly visible (ie people who don't 
really care about computers will actually notice them, I wouldn't say 
the same thing is true for icons and widgets, except when things looks 
"weird and unpolished").

When it comes to widgets, things can possibly get a bit more 
unpredictable for app developers and will result in a couple of more 
bugs (and fixes for one thing in Fedora and another thing upstream, but 
probably not the same thing).

As for icons I think Fedora does exactly the right thing with Mist. It 
follows the tango guidelines, so it will work well with 90% of the other 
stuff out there and is shipped with gnome-themes, so any bug fixes will 
benefit both ways, but still allows Fedora to maintain the distinct blue 
look.
Another cool thing is that Susan Kare  [2] originally designed Mist for 
Eazel [3], so it's a nice nod to computer history. :)

1. http://www.andreasn.se/blog/?p=58
2. http://www.kare.com
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel

- Andreas