idea for Fedora boot screen

Máirín Duffy mairin at linuxgrrl.com
Fri Apr 10 13:35:47 UTC 2009


Hi Nicu,



----- Original Message ----
> From: Nicu Buculei <nicu_fedora at nicubunu.ro>
> Subject: Re: idea for Fedora boot screen
> On 04/09/2009 07:33 PM, Michael Langlie wrote:
> > I added a third version that does not use the Fedora logo or branding.
> > The layered Photoshop files are also zipped and posted on my page.
> 
> Sorry for the apparently rude question, but Mike, it would be hard to use GIMP 
> or any FOSS tool for creating such trivial type of graphics?

I think in this case it's probably okay, and here's why I think why:

1) Animation is hard in FOSS. Besides Blender (which is overkill for this) there isn't really much. Gimp does have the animation tool and that probably could have been used here, but Mike did provide the PSD source which is openable by Gimp so we could modify the animation if we needed to. (I will admit it would take a significant amount of work to manipulate in Gimp because of how Photoshop sets up animations in the PSD, but still possible. In the future Gimp-based animations would make it easier for others to work with the file.) Even so, animation in FOSS is not a solved problem.

2) The animation is in gif format, not flash, not quicktime, etc. etc. Animated GIF I think is an animation format we can al agree on.

3) (I think this is the most important) The animation is not going to be used directly in Fedora. It's (correct me if I'm wrong) meant to be a mockup to demonstrate to Charlie how he will write the animation in Python. So the final product won't have much to do with proprietary tools, fortunately.

What do you think with those in mind?
> 
> We use to pride about the Fedora graphics being made *with* Fedora, as a 
> testimony of our confidence in the distro and I see the Photoshop here as a step 
> back. Even more as I wasn't able to see a straightforward way to create the 
> final GIFs starting from your PSDs with a Free tool (I guess is about 
> transitions or some other unsupported features from the file format).

There is a way, it just requires a bit of time to set up, which we don't have much of now unfortunately. I do like the first animation though, and I talked to Charlie about doing a version of it with the thin Greek accent line along the bottom, but in a way that the Greek accent could be taken out easiy (eg for F12.) I think we're going to need a different approach to the artwork for F12 but we can talk about that when this stuff is out the door. Anyhow, I think adding just a simple subtle greek line along the bottom of the animation would tie it in with the other graphics [1]; I talked to Mike about whether or not he thought this might work and he thought it would be a fine approach.

It really sucks that our animation tools suck. I wonder if synfig [2] is any more up to snuff these days. I have not tried it lately. It could be a useful tool in the future.

~m

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F11/RC
[2] http://synfig.org/



      




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