Before the holidays I did a few very impromptu live design sessions/chats using streaming / video chats (the first was on twitch but I didn’t like how one-way it was, so subsequent ones were on Jitsi.) We did some live digital painting, a design critique session, and also a Discourse theming session, with a lot of fun and random chatter and banter
I’d like to continue this on a more regular / planned basis, maybe every two weeks, and I am inviting my current set of interns and mentees to join in too (hoping it can be a teaching tool for them!) The idea is anyone participating can bring some design work they are working on for some critique / advice / etc. and if nobody has anything to show off I will always have some Fedora design ticket or thing I’m working on that we can look at as a back up. I want it to be very laid-back / chill but also a super-respectful, calm, encouraging, and safe environment. All of the Fedora code of conduct [1] rules apply.
If this is something you’d be interested in participating in or if you have any ideas or concerns around it, let me know. I am hoping to schedule the first session sometime next week.
Thanks for everyone who joined! I think I lost count at how many folks
we had participate, we had at least 9 and we had a very productive F35
wallpaper brainstorming session!
We took a look at Madeline’s thumbnail sketches for the upcoming Fedora element.io deployment.
We looked at Mozilla’s login screen to see what they did: mozilla.element.io.
-I gave a little background on the project and the concept of the
initial thumbnail sketch i did with lights: the gist is users joining
the chat server are in the dark foreground approaching this glowing city
full of communication / vitality, and the shape/glow of the buildings
skyline is meant to evoke the shape of a sound wave of a voice.
Madeline talked us through her 4 thumbnail sketches and their concepts
she made some refinements to the glowing city concept, and also riffed
off of the idea with the neat buildings hanging together with the water
reflection and clouds (the chat is in the cloud!), and the natural/calm
vibe of looking up through the trees
-We all pretty much enjoyed all of them and there was no clear favorite.
One point that was brought up is that the login dialog will be in the
center of the image so Madeline noted that her final design will need to
work well with a dialog of unknown size floating over top it.
The thumbnail idea with the trees relates to the F34 wallpaper which
we discussed next.
The basic background here is that we’re going for a calm, tranquil
image as a counter to the craziness that has been the past year or so
with the pandemic and other stuff going on. The inspiration here was Ub
Iwerks who invented the multiplane camera so the key element of this
image/composition is the built in layered effect. The technique is meant
to be watercolor-style, and watercolor as a medium heavily relies on
layering itself
Marie noticed a halo behind the tree on the left, it stands out too
much so I’ll adjust it
Neal noted we should package up something for the night version for
beta if we intend to have time of day wallpaper even if it’s rough, it’s
better than nothing.
I wrote up a summary in the ticket, but essentially we did a
collaborative mindmap, dropping links to images and coming up with
related ideas, basically creating a big map of brain food to keep
building ideas. Next steps are to do some sketches based on the 4 sort
of themes that shook out of the mind map exercise.
OK now some tech notes:
The link I put on the community blog and here to join dumped folks
straight to Jitsi without the Matrix chat. Next time we should just use
the Matrix chat as the main link to join, because the Jitsi window
doesn’t have a separate chat for link dumping so we need to use the
Matrix chat for that.
Jitsi does not have built-in recording so the session wasn’t recorded.
It’s my understanding it’s possible to record using OBS, so I will try
that next session.
I can’t think of anything else. Feel free to reply here if there’s
something I forgot or if you had some technical or format issues / ideas
/ feedback to make our next session better. Thanks everyone!
