unity-design team mailing list archive

[Saleel Velankar <svelanka@xxxxxxxxx>]

I did some some kde plasma themeing for/with gaia10 this summer
(<http://www.gaia10.us/forum/thread.php?threadid=212&threadview=0&hilight=&hilightuser=0&page=4>
link),<http://www.gaia10.us/forum/thread.php?threadid=212&threadview=0&hilight=&hilightuser=0&page=4>and
am pleased to note that this years gaia project, which makes art to
raise awareness of climate change, has been very successful in the
amount/quality of art it has produced. I think there are lessons here that
were new to me, which may not be so new for you, that were worth learning
for community artwork. Broadly I can split these up into 3 groups: Gather,
Incubate, Release.

Gathering artists is a tricky business, clearly you want a good level of
skill present, but you also want to attract any old fool like myself that
happens to be clicking around looking for a project to contribute to. Also
you want to have a place where artwork can be quickly uploaded and discussed
without artificial limits such as editing a wiki, or forum limits on image
size. One of the interesting things that Marius, the curator of this year’s
project, did was to target the deviant art customization community, which is
huge and is generally game for such things. By setting up a group that
spelled out the vision of this years project (more on this later) he gained
a lot of eyeballs. But by actually hosting the project off deviantart he
essentially created a level of abstraction that made only interested parties
sign up. He also contacted very skilled artists directly and asked them to
contribute, not to the forums or the community part but rather to the
finished release directly. Lessons learned by me:
1. Trust the skilled artists and give them lots of freedom to create things.

2. Create a small level of abstraction to slightly filter the community.
3. Create and establish working relationships with successful digital
artists.

Incubating the project. Marius essentially laid out a strong vision of how
he felt the gaia widgets should look and feel across the different
platforms. It was unique and in many circumstances impossible to do. But the
community responded by either making mockups of their own, or starting to
port the vision as best they could on their platforms. A couple of things to
note that I feel were important: the community was actively asked/encouraged
to not post the work/screenshots outside the forum. Secrecy was not enforced
afaik, but implied and encouraged. I thought that this was important. having
sites like omg swoop in and report on halfbaked ideas and plans is
destructive. The second thing I would like to add is that there was some
really good critiquing to be found in the wallpaper sections etc. The
interesting thing was that the artists sometimes did refuse certain critique
if it didn’t fit their vision. What tools the artists used were mostly up to
them, and no particular set of tools was encouraged.
Lessons learned:
1. Trust the community, do not enforce too many rules

ex: wallpapers just had to above a certain size, no other rules.
2. Encourage secrecy outside, encourage sharing inside (resources/mockups)
3. Allow the good ideas to float up through critique.
4. Set a strong vision, and have one person who is (artist+coder) in charge

The project is still being released, with new stuff being added to the
gallery as time allows. And its important to note that the deadline was
pushed back atleast twice to make sure that everything was ready.And when I
mean release I do not mean making a package and adding it to the repos. Take
a look at how the art is being showcased, with its own slick site, along
with previews and with interview with those trusted top artists. The group
on DA is accepting screenshots of people using this stuff, so they can be
featured. etc. The eyeballs that were gathered on
facebook/deviantart/twitter are now the ones that are spreading the work.
Lessons learned:
1. Release when its ready and not according to a deadline
2. Release loudly, hit the social networks
3. Involve the general public in using the work, and spreading it.

Now a lot of what I have typed is probably oldhat for the people on this
list, but this is the part where I attempt to look at how we can use these
lessons in making some great community artwork for Natty. I think we have a
good deal of artists currently using ubuntu/linux that would love to
contribute to community themeing. Unfortunately since the genesis of this
list the ubuntu-art list is essentially dead. By moving the wallpaper stuff
to flickr, we have involved the general public, but not necessarily the
artist subcommunity.

Why do we limit our community artwork just to ubuntu?  This is silly. Arch
or Suse or others also use the same programs that can use this artwork.
(wallpapers/themes) we should try to publish our community artwork as not
just a deb, but also a native package format to be used by those
distributions. Having our artwork being available on their systems,
generates goodwill towards us and helps draw more eyeballs, and possibly
more artists. The community will port this stuff anyways, lets use and
feature it. Linux remains the only platform that gives a great deal of
freedom in the way gui can be customized (themeing windows/mac is a
nightmare.)

Why don’t we use the forums? Also silly. Google a linux problem and 8 times
out of 10 a UF response will be at the top. There are a lot of knowledgeable
people there. Lets use something like these forums to incubate our projects
instead of the wiki/mailing lists, which are full of limitations. We already
have a kickass ubuntu-artists group in deviantart, and we could easily
create a new group for community artwork much in the same way as gaia (not
for contributions, but for eyeballs)

When we have done stuff in the past, we havent pushed it hard across the
ecosystem. Lets the push the results of the community-artwork across social
networks. Take the kickass wallpapers that came through the flickr group.
While these aren’t community wallpapers, I see no mention of them on the
mainsite. (Although I did see them on the design blog, so kudos there.)

I have typed a lot more than I planned to, and if you read this I thank you
for it. I think its time we start looking at making and publishing community
artwork that will really shine. Also first post to the list. (woot!) I would
post this to the old list but I really think we need someone to set the
direction and get the ball rolling. I rather like the idea of having an
overarching idea/cause to focus our community art on.

-- 
Saleel