artwork

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 6:18 PM, coz DS <cosimo321 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>   I had been on the art team for a number of years.
> I am really surprised that some of the artwork,  ie,,,boot splash  and
> splash screen with progress bar  , were able to be considered let alone
> actually used.
>    I have to tell you that that the choices for these images and colours
> are completely not ubuntu in any way and certainly the worst choice.
>   When booting into karmic,  the white ubuntu symbol should have had the
> colours gradually fill it in as a progress bar...and the following boot
> splash the ubuntu logo certainly should have had color and the background
> for that image most definitely should NOT have been used...it implies  a
> dark..albeit muddy,, theme is going to be default system theme.
>    I have seen none of the major distributions have any
> inconsistencies...including ubuntu...with graphics during install..or
> boot..as radical and inappropriate  as karmic has.
>   Who ever has made these decisions  is most likely a developer and there
> are NO developers capable of making final choices for anything without
> discussing the options with at least one "qualified"  artist.
>    Creating and deciding on graphics , especially for a distribution as
> globally used as Ubuntu, takes as much skill and time and mental
> capabilities as it does to code "any" application...or DE..and any of the
> developers who think otherwise  should be kept as far away from decision
> making about graphics  permanently!!!
>   To mr shuttleworth,,, if you are making final decisions then you need to
> pull yourself away from graphics altogether and let the art team back in as
> official...if on the other hand you are relying on an "artist" at cononical
> to make these final decisions ,, then please give them their walking papers.
>     coz

I tried very hard to ignore this bait, but I am going to bite...

First, before sending an email criticizing aesthetics, I would pass my
own text through a spell checker and carefully examine the format of
the composition.

Second, it is a gross miscalculation to assume that all software
developers are necessarily art-challenged.  Many of our own Ubuntu
core developers are quite accomplished photographers, musicians,
dancers, writers, and artists.

Third, open criticism of the appearance of the Ubuntu development
branch is most certainly welcome.  However, please consider that these
splash screens have been in the present form for several months now.
To provide this sort of feedback in an inflammatory manner days before
the release is hardly constructive.  This feedback might have been
quite useful around UserInterfaceFreeze, over a month ago:
 * https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KarmicReleaseSchedule
Please keep this schedule in mind for our next release:
 * https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidReleaseSchedule

Finally, to call for someone's job over artwork that does not suit a
particular taste is rather insulting.  I am a developer on the Ubuntu
Server Team for Canonical, somewhat distanced from our artwork and
user interface teams.  However, I do know that these are brilliant
people, who are working hard to make Ubuntu a beautiful collection of
software.  Your friendly Ubuntu developers are in fact real humans,
with spouses, children, families.  Heck, most even have feelings.  We
would do ourselves a service to remember this, before lobbing grenades
over the wall.

:-Dustin