[ubuntu-art] New icons

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Pascal, I'm surprised to hear that from you given that we spent several
hours together at LCA in New Zealand, and discussed ways to get
community contributions directly into Dapper.

The goal is to get a few of the best community themes into Dapper, and
have professional artists supplement that work where necessary. I see a
partnership between community contributors and professional artists as
one of the great things about Ubuntu - the community gets its best work
showcased, and interested folks get to work with professionals where
previously they may not have been able to.

Now, as I understood it, Pascal was going to help organise the community
side of things here, so that we could identify two or three crisp, clean
community-contributed themes for inclusion in Dapper.  Best I can tell,
that hasn't happened yet, so Pascal please get onto that or ask someone
else to take the reins. I suggest that you identify at most three
candidates for inclusion, based on their quality and completeness, and
focus the energy of the art team on those three to see if one or more
can get up to snuff for Dapper.

Getting a good theme together requires strong leadership - those of you
who think you have what it takes, organise teams around your themes and
polish them up. Make sure that there's a web site where we can review
and assess the themes. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are of course equally
important, so make sure we give equal time to the blue folks.

We will only include themes that meet a very high standard of quality
and completeness - it wouldn't be Ubuntu if it were half done.

We have a UI sprint in London next week (all welcome) where we will be
polishing more of the icons / desktop / theme bits. I expect Dapper to
look pretty sharp by the end of that.

I've subscribed to this list and I'll stay monitoring it for the next
couple of week. If you want to live up to the standard of other Ubuntu
teams you need:

 - *Leadership*. Identify someone who is dedicated (this stuff takes
time) and work with Henrik to organise all the work that is to be done.
As a team, you need to know how to take decisions and then move forward
with those decisions. You won't all agree most of the time - so you need
leadership to get everyone to go in a common direction rather than
following their own artistic muses all the time.

 - *Teamwork*. If you want community-contributed themes to match up,
then you can't divide yourselves a hundred different ways. Pick a few
high quality starting points, and push hard on those to improve their
completeness. Write up good style guides for the key themes you pick, so
that new contributors can produce work that is consistent. It isn't so
much of an accomplishment to do a single beautiful desktop image as it
is to produce a complete set of icons, with GTK theme and desktop,
splash screens etc. You will ONLY achieve this with teamwork.

 - *Organisation*. There is a lot to be done, and I can't find any
obvious starting point that lists each of the areas that need work. Get
that right, and you will find new people joining in as they can see what
needs to be done.

 - *Presentation*. This is even more important in the art team than it
is elsewhere. Your stuff needs to be shown off to best effect! Don't
hide your light under a bushel, so to speak, make sure that your work
gets visibility. Your leadership should arrange an Ubuntu Art website
where the best themes get presented completely, so that people can
immerse themselves in them.

So guys, this is a challenge. Raise your game. Make clear, good
suggestions for this new icon theme, and organise yourselves better to
produce some community contributed themes that make it into Dapper itself.

Mark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-art/attachments/20060301/f4d61c9f/attachment.htm