[ubuntu-art] Solutions

[Martin Owens]

On Mon, 2010-09-20 at 00:32 -0500, Jake Tolbert wrote:
> Doing design in a open source sort of way is really, really difficult
> (I haven't yet seen a successful model--it may exist, but I haven't
> seen it), which, I assume, is why it's not happening here.

I'd point to games for both successes to emulate and lessons from
failures. Take Battle for Wesnoth, wonderful graphics, very unified and
everything has a good feeling.

> Unfortunately, until this community has a way to meaningful way to
> actually contribute to Ubuntu, I think it'll continue to languish. I'm
> not trying to be negative--on the contrary, I think there's a LOT of
> potential here (I really think Ubuntu has the potential to break
> through the outlandishly difficult problem of open source design). I'm
> just not smart enough to solve the problem itself.

Well this group competes against Mark's own thoughts and preferences, so
it's not hard to see who would win when one has employees and a direct
line into implementation and everyone else has been relegated to
sub-meteoritic discussion (although it's very slowly getting better).

For design I'd stick with Ayatana, for art, some marketing, some ubuntu
studio work, working with the art community on their needs and generally
working on arty things like themes, icons, sound themes and so on which
we _know_ won't be in the release, but at least could be made very
easily available.

Part of the problem with art from a packaging side is that very few
artists know how to package themes, wallpapers and other things, should
we have an education project based around that?

I could see us doing a bit of research too in how to make customising
the desktop with our artwork easier. Right now including wallpapers on
the CD is the only way to get them listed in the wallpaper choosing
dialog. There is no reason for that limitation other than coding and
having ways to see online art in context would be a big boon for many
customisation artists.

Thoughts?

Martin,