[ubuntu-art] Wallpapers

[Damian Vila]

Hi Anton,

Of course, I'm glad to share the way I work. It will be lengthy, I must
warn you. :-)
First of all a disclaimer: excuse me, because re-reading my previous
mail I think that my translation of the phrase you are mentioning, wich
I'm glad to answer, didn't sound in English as I intended in Spanish. It
looks like I can do people "like" my work at will, something any
designer knows is impossible. What I wanted to say is that I usually
analize what happens to my designs afterwards and try to identify why
they have worked or not. Something that I was taught to do in college by
my professors. Having some kind of feedback about your work is as
important as knowing your audience beforehand. My teachers insisted in
this kind of behavior. They always told us that we had some kind of
responsibility for the messages we were helping spread, so it was
important for us to know if it reached the audience as intended or not.
So, as I said, I'm glad to explain why I believe my work was supported
by so many people, something that gladly surprised me, but that has a
reasonable explanation.

- The first step in creating the Animal series was observing.
As you may see in my profile at the Ubuntu forums, I registered some
time ago, but I have not posted a lot of messages. I spend a lot of time
observing, lurking if you want, before taking part in something, or
collaborating in a community.
One of the mistakes some designers make at the beggining of a project is
being too impulsive about it. I tend to be passionate about my work, so
sometimes I restrain from sending something before I have some decent
knowledge of the community (or the job at hand) and its dynamics. And
specially, before knowing what is expected. Most of the times, this
knowledge really helps.
I believe the best place to know what the Ubuntu user wants is to have a
look at the forums.
The "regular" user don't read specific mailing list, or enters specific
channels at IRC. They express what they want in forums or blogs.
So I read a lot about what people wanted in the forums before sending
something.

- The second step was getting an idea, something to start with.
This was prety easy with Ubuntu. It's african roots are very inspiring.
The sense of freedom from the FLOSS movement had to be reflected also.
I'm the kind of person that finds inspiration everywhere. So, It was
clear at the beginning that it should be african inspired.
I also try to isolate myself from trendy design sites around the time I
start working on something. Some people like to look those kind of sites
for inspiration. I don't need that and feel those sites contaminate my
work. But this is just a personal choice.
So, my first idea was to look for images that could inspire me. I got to
this picture: http://flickr.com/photos/evmurdock/84671834/in/set-1808168/
As a wallpapers it was rather obvious and not very suitable, but it gave
me enough inspiration to start with.

- The third step was to see previous artwork and try to understund its
rules. And also document myself a lot about the subject.
It was clear that all the previous artwork had a similar palette. So,
sending something in greens or blues was out of the question. I also
read the wiki, so, I had enough elements to start playing around. It had
to be brown, with a touch of yellows, oranges, etc. "Earthy" was what
came to my mind.

So, by mere association I came to the idea of the animals. It started
with "african", and then "freedom", "plains", "animals", and then,
specifically to "lions" and "elephants". I added more animals, to see
wich ones gave the best results.
I started my search of animal pictures. I found lots. So I tried several
approaches.

- The fourth step was to apply what I know to the ideas I had.
I know that, by Fitts' law, the edges (and specially corners) of the
desktop are the most useful places, so because of that people tend to
leave icons near the edges (gestaltic associations takes a role, also).
It's not a fixed rule, but it helps to start taking decisions. And also
peripheral vision helps you distinguish what's not in the center of the
eye, so, the edges needs to be darker than the center to offer more
contrast and help peripheral vision. I also know that the human eye can
distinguish more the contrast than the color (the principle used in JPEG
compression algorithm), so a wallpaper with lots of contrast, or with a
very clear and contrasted object (like a macro of an object, for
example, or even the landscape I used as reference) is not the best
approach because it's too distracting. A good picture is something nice
to see, but not to have as a background as you try to do your job. It
was clear to me that a texture was going to work best.

So, so far I had:
- African animals (Lions, elephants, giraffes, etc.)
- Texture with few distracting elements
- Earthy tones
- Dark edges

So, I started to make the wallpapers. (You can see the proposals at the
wiki).

-The fifth step was self-criticism
When I got something I liked, I used it in my own desktop to see if it
really worked. I thought it was pleasing, and no distracting at all, so,
it looked good so far.
But still I had more concerns. I knew that it was very different to
everything I have seen so far in an OS. And it was specially very
different from most design trends in other OSs. Ubuntu is a very special
distro. It's the brown distro. This is very unusual, so it looked
natural to have an unusual wallpaper. But, was it good enough for the
most popular Linux distro?
Since it satisfied the formal needs, I decided to give it a go. And I
thought it looked pretty decent. So I put them in the wiki.

-Sixth step was listening to the feedback