FWN/Beats/Design

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Beta Artwork

At the suggestion of Paul Fields, the design team requested a small delay to properly include the artwork for the Fedora 12 Beta release "Rather than require anyone to pull a late night, why don't we simply hit the rel-eng list for an up-front exception to the freeze?" and the time was enough for Máirín Duffy to come with a polished wallpaper, which was packaged with help from Martin Sourada and Michael Beckwith. Máirín also advanced a set of splashes about the upcoming scheduled tasks "We still need to take care of a few things though. Not only do we have to keep our eyes and ears open for feedback on the beta artwork to improve in the final release, but we also have other tasks to complete as well", consisting on website banners, media art and posters. Nicu Buculei replied with some pointers and invited fresh blood to the task "As we have a number of new contributors asking for an opportunity to get their feet wet with some contributions, I want to point this is a very good opportunity".

Wallpapers Extras

Samuele Storari reiterated the goal to provide a set of additional wallpapers, from which the users have an option to chose and proposed a copule of competing images "I've worked on 2 proposal for the Women Extra Themes". Nicu Buculei praised them and pleaded for finding a way to make all available "But no matter what is our final choice, you put a lot of work and skill on them, I think it would be a real shame if we don't manage to find a way to make all of them available somehow (an additional package, a web gallery, something)" and Martin Sourada completed with some instructions about packaging wallpapers but opting to wait until a general decision "I'd wait with the packaging after the final decision on extras is done, as your blue 4flowers design is a hot candidate ;-)"

A New Notification Theme

After in the previous week Matthias Clasen announced a new and controversial notification theme, Christoph Wickert, maintainer of the Xfce Spin, protested about the look, "After I have seen them now I can say I think they are horrible" and the practice "I think such changes shouldn't been done as a solo action without previous notice." John Poelstra showed his worries regarding a change late in the release cycle " Why are we making this change now (right before the final freeze) when Feature freeze was almost two months ago. Why can't this wait for Fedora 13?" and Paul Fields pointed to inconsistency with the rest of the desktop, making it a non-trivial change "It does seem like a pretty minor change and very low risk. But all black? Really? OK, it does get my attention faster, so I'll give you that one. However, the interactive bits (buttons in a bubble) are inconsistent", a point of view shared by Bill Nottingham "So, looking at this now, it looks like it integrates well with the gnome-shell sort of desktop/palette, but not the current gnome defaults.[...] I'm also concerned about the timing of this... I take it this wasn't ready at feature freeze?". As a reply, William Jon McCann, Matthias' colleague from the Red Hat Desktop Team invited complainers to use an competing operating system "By the way have you tried the latest Ubuntu nightly? It isn't half bad. Snow Leopard? Doesn't suck. Windows 7 - yeah I could use that."