Monday Report #1

In which an institution is born and the stories of the past week is mulled over. But firstly a short thing about my problems to comment on my own blog and a short "sorry".

CC-SA, PBS

Right, the issue I thought I should mention is that I have problems commenting on my own blog using chromium so if I don't reply fast enough - please don't think I don't read what you've written, its just that I need to move between browsers. So I might comment a tad slower.

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The idea here is to give a weekly update of whats going on in the Visual Design Group until stuff becomes more and more public. Hopefully every monday for a while.

First off right now we have the addition of four new designers:
Acidrums the designer who made the Betelguese icon theme.
Cuan Knaggs a South African designer working on business focused design at Revolver.
Luisa Pires a designer that focus on webdesign and brand design.
Muhammed Nafees a programmer and KDE dev from Jamshedpur.

More on all ten of us later since I plan on doing something like an interview when the time comes.

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We're trying to build up the level of trust needed to run a group like this and at the same time compile a good list of jobs that has to be done as well as find a focus for our design ideas.
How do you do that on a very short time when these things tend to take time? You force it. So we've started setting up a short training exercise to get the work going - essentially just spitting out ideas and seeing what sticks. Go without limits, just have fun with ideas and concepts. From there the plan is to go to the realistic.

Simply match up the best ideas from the wild attempts with whats really possible and get a solid design idea out of it. There are some tentative tries with mood boards and suggestions at the moment and more is getting added daily.
By next monday - there will be solid work coming out next monday at this rate.

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We're also looking at a good sollution to the icon issue. Lets be frank here - our greatest focus is on Plasma Next - and what we need is a more modern set of icons to be used and its to be released fairly soon. But the Oxygen Icon theme is enormous, its one of the most complete icon themes out there and it took about a year of constant work. So how do we manage to get it done in time?
As it is, one solution would be to replace the central icons, the system icons and then move slowly through the whole icon theme. Maybe replacing them with another icon theme to start with and then move through them all one by one?

Aside from that plans for launch pages for some of the underlying technology coming soon are being done and also promo and presskit ideas are being talked about.

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Finally there is the issue of how to organize a design effort beyond the ten of us there are now? Bugtrackers and mailing lists have met with skepticism within the group to say the least - but how do you keep track of the work that needs to be done, what is being addressed by someone else and how to participate? How can we move from what is now a closed group into a larger community effort?

I'm not trying to be cute and start with rhetorical questions - these are all valid and something that I think about daily. The point was "create a design group and a good workflow and environment for designers within KDE" not "isolate all design choices". This is open source and transparency and openness are extremely relevant, but how do you combine them with design work without getting back to the issues that was before? (again, not rhetorical)