Re: The status of desktop-base in wheezy
Hi Paul,
I understand, that there are deadlines, but I'm not very happy with how
this went:
Firstly, I feel completely misled by all the different media asked from
proposals for the new desktop environment. The Design you picked up was
one with just a bunch of screens in just one proportion without any
thought what so ever concerning cropping or other different needs. Even
the other proposals you mentioned as "close to winners" didn't respect
those demands at all.
Therefore I obviously did a lot of unnecessary work. If it had been
clear from the beginning, that it wasn't relevant to provide designs for
different use cases I could have saved a lot of time for doing other
things or additional design drafts.
Secondly, it seemed clear from the beginning, that there would be some
sort of voting to pick the final design out of all proposals. There
wouldn't have been any hard feelings if you had made it clear from the
beginning, that the person responsible for implementing it would make a
choice based on personal taste alone. But this wasn't the case.
In the past I wondered why you had only so few proposals for Squeeze.
Debian is a major distribution with millions of users and therefore it
is a great honour to see your own design as default on the desktop
environment. Now that I can look back at my own experience I can
understand why you didn't have more drafts the last time. It wasn't
satisfying for me as a designer at all.
Please state clear rules that you will stick to next time!
Even if I myself like the clean, minimalistic look of Joy, I can't say
that I feel my work is valued or my effords respected.
Additionally I wonder how you plan to escape the problems of the actual
background image with cropped of parts leaving the design less than
optimal. As good and calm as a centred layout looks: It's symmetric
stability is obviously destroyed by cropping it on the right or
bottom...
Some people invested a lot of work providing as complete proposals as
possible. I don't think I'm the only one feeling unhappy with the way
this has turned out.
I have nothing against you or your work Adrien. I'm happy, that your
minimalistic and clean proposal got picked and I hope you can find a
good solution for all use cases.
Best
Franz
On Thu, 2012-06-21 at 16:08 -0400, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> Howdy, desktop,
>
> As many of you know, we're tragically close to freeze. As a result, the
> usual process of voting, debating and picking a theme via consensus is
> not really possible. There was also a distinct lack of interest in such
> a process, as well.
>
> I've taken it upon myself to start getting desktop-base into shape for
> wheezy.
>
> I've picked the "Joy"[1] theme by Adrien Aubourg as the default
> for Debian 7.0, which features a tasteful, understated and classic
> look, something that both identifies as Debian while still maintaining
> an air of professionalism.
>
> Congrats, and thank you Adrien!
>
> I'd like to thank everyone who submited artwork, and express how
> impressed I am with the artistic talent we have in Debian.
>
> I'd like to also give high honors to the "Roj"[2] theme, as well as the
> "7th Element"[3] theme. If there was more time before freeze, I'd love to
> have seen a working mockup of 7th Element. I don't think anyone will
> argue that 7th Element had one of the most jaw-dropping and impressive
> login designs I've ever seen.
>
> The plan for wheezy is as follows:
>
> * I've pushed changes to desktop-base to SVN.
>
> * Once I give it some finial polish, I will target an upload to experimental,
> where it will (hopefully) recieve some testing, feedback and patches.
>
> * Once it's in good shape, or directly before freeze, an upload to
> unstable will be targeted.
>
> Cheers,
> - Paul
>
> [1]: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
> [2]: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Roj
> [3]: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/7th-element
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