Fedora 40 Wallpaper Talk!

The Fedora wallpaper is always on such a journey 😄. The last blog post I wrote specifically dedicated to the Fedora wallpaper is linked here if you’re interested in reading and getting a sense of what goes into it.

As I write this, Fedora 40 is live, and being the big four-zero the other design team members and I thought we should do something special. Instead of being inspired by a STEM person in history with an O last name we chose the word “Open” (conveniently starting with O as well!).

We always create a mind map to brainstorm different ways of interpreting the theme we could go with.

1. Open Outdoors

Slightly obvious with the open outdoors and the word “open”. But in the same way that open-source software is developed in a collaborative, public manner- nature works in a connected and collaborative way as well to create something bigger and better.

2. Trees

Trees have roots and branches that spread out and interconnect. Trees continue to grow, change, and distribute seeds, similarly to open-source code. Obviously, open source doesn’t distribute literal seeds, but seeds of knowledge are thrown into the community!

3. Open Windows to Nature

Having an inside window looking outside shows that we’re always looking towards something with an open mind. Inspired a bit like the Lo-Fi girl who sits next to a window, it would provide a very appealing wallpaper.

4. Open Path

Again, it’s a bit on the nose with “Open” but we wouldn’t want to illustrate a closed path haha, now would we? The possibilities are endless on a path though. In the same way, working together in an open-source way offers endless opportunities that closed-source software might not.

After we made the mind map I felt inspired to create the image below in Krita. It started as just playing around with different textured brushes and seeing what I was immediately drawn to. I then drew over what I had on a separate layer with a proper guideline.

An open path or river, up to the viewer’s interpretation, through the tree’s overlapping connecting branches.

Fedora 40 Day Wallpaper

Fedora 40 Night Wallpaper

This was intended to be just the beta wallpaper. As the creator of the piece, I didn’t think it looked finished, and there were details I wanted to add to make it perfect. Although there’s a phrase I try to live by in situations like, “Make it finished, not perfect.” And this was a finished wallpaper!

The Fedora wallpaper is not a project that is entirely on my shoulders though. It’s always a collaboration! As the deadline quickly approached we luckily had a few contributors who had some options for F40. Below are some of the first ideas and drafts from Yotam Guttman.

wip 1

The orange and brown desert path version is the first draft of how we ended up with the images below! Yotam had so many different ideas and did an amazing job taking constructive criticism from the team and taking the first version to the last.

wip 2

wip 3

In the Fedora 40 ticket, you can see all the conversations and different versions.

The amazing Yotam Guttman created the images below in Inkscape as an option for F40!

Fedora 41 Day Wallpaper

Fedora 41 Night Wallpaper

The Design Team and I absolutely loved Yotam’s work and were set on using it for F40 but for various reasons, deadlines creeping up on us, it was easier to use the beta wallpaper as the final wallpaper. We have used the beta as the final wallpaper before and it isn’t a big deal. But we loved those art pieces above and really wanted to use them! So we are going to use them for the Fedora 41 Wallpaper!

What does this mean?

Well! The great thing is that we are now ahead of schedule for F41!

F41 would have been inspired by something starting with the letter P, and this piece of work has a beautiful P as in Path! We plan on using the finished versions designed by Yotam (you can see any small updates and documentation on the F41 ticket here) and are ready to start working on the F42 wallpaper!

This way we can have more flexibility for edits, and time between finishing the wallpaper and handing it over for the Final Freeze deadlines. In the future, with all the wallpapers we will be ahead of schedule from this development!

If you’re interested in contributing to the Fedora 42 wallpaper find out more at this ticket. Anyone is welcome and encouraged to engage and participate!

EDA and the Three Dwarves

What a long journey this coloring book has gone on! This blog post has been sitting in my drafts for over a year and I thought it was finally time to publish it.

If you’re not aware of the previous coloring books, they have been a series of projects started by Máirín Duffy and Dan Walsh to increase awareness and convey a better understanding of different technology.

For example, ‘The Container Coloring Book: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ is a coloring book where the three little pigs teach you how to keep the big bad wolf from blowing your container-based applications down. The book covers security, management, resource control, namespaces, and much more that people should keep in mind when creating their own applications with containers.

All of the past (and hopefully future coloring books too!) are kept here at www.red.ht/coloring

‘EDA and the Three Dwarves’ was written by Máirín Duffy and then the script was handed off to me when I was an intern in 2020.

I numbered each beat in the script that I could imagine a visual for, which was a lot since this was going to be a comic and not just one picture on each page.

When I drew a thumbnail version of the page I could then add the numbers to keep track of how far I was. This way I knew which parts of the script had visuals.

Below are some of the pages in thumbnail form. There are page numbers 1,2,3,4 etc. at the bottom - as well as the other numbers that correlated with the script scattered on the page. Ultimately after I thumbnailed the whole script I decided that it would be 20 pages total.

After the pages were roughly blocked out I went into Krita and sketched out the illustrations. Sometimes certain pages were easier, or they would need a reference photo, but I drew all the pages in a good amount of detail. You can see how the first thumbnail above on the top left, turned into the first page below.

Snow White is the main character of our story and I wanted the first page to have her in front of her bakery and draw the readers in.

After the pages were blocked out in Krita, I brought them into Inkscape to vectorize them. Below you can see how the sketch transformed to the final!

This was a really great project to launch my Red Hat career, it gave me a great base for knowledge about containers and to familiarize myself with Open Source programs.

Mo and I gave some comments about the process that you can read in this article.

As always, thank you for reading about the process! If you are interested in reading the coloring book or printing it for yourself at home, you can find the PDF here.

Creative Freedom Summit Super Hero Art Challenge

Background

In 1989 Ray Oldenburg described a ‘third place’ as, “a place outside your home or work where you can relax and hang out.”

Libraries, parks, gyms, bookstores, and porches are all examples. In a post-Covid world not only have ‘third places’ slowly dwindled in number but it is increasingly hard to find places that don’t require spending a lot of money to enjoy. For those who have started working from home, their first and second places have merged into one with the home office. The internet is now its own third place. With it, we have the power to socialize, consume media, share knowledge casually, and document it formally.

This virtual third place seemed like the perfect place to host an event where like-minded individuals, passionate about Open Source and creating art could come together.

“[I came up with the idea] at Nest 2022. Ashlyn was running a user testing session, we had some other design sessions and I was thinking how cool it would be to have a virtual event focused on creative free software. I think I initially envisioned it to be a Fedora design event, but once I got interested peeps together to work on it, we decided that spreading free software love was more important than gaining contributors.” - Marie Nordin

In January 2023 the Creative Freedom Summit occurred for the first time and was the first virtual conference dedicated only to the features and benefits of Open Source creative tools. The mission included inspiring fellow artists, designers, and makers to learn how to use and get excited about Open Source creative programs.

Concept

We decided to host an art challenge where the community could design their interpretation of an Open Source super hero.

We decided that the poster should emulate old super hero comic book covers. Below on the left is the inspiration photo compared to my first sketch on the right. Details that we wanted to include were, block text, curved text, banners, graphic lines, the vertical rectangle in the top left corner, and texture.

A vintage cover of The Amazing Spiderman comic

Draft 1 -A blue sketchy draft of the Creative Freedom Summit Art Challenge Poster where a flashlight shines a circle with a question mark in it.

I documented the process for this poster within this ticket on gitlab. So I took my sketch into Inkscape and started vectorizing and laying out all the text we had so far.

I followed Emma’s how to on her blog to make the circle gradient. The next step was creating the transparent question mark shape within the circle gradient. Using the text tool I created a question mark, used object to path, and then placing the black question mark over the grouped gradient circle I was able to set an inverse mask which achieved what I wanted.

Draft 2 of the CF Summit Art Challenge now in Inkscape with a blue to purple gradient

This version is still pretty rough. I received feedback from @riecatnor:

• I think this design is nice- but I also really liked the more sketchy design you showed previously.. is there a reason you went with something more "slick"? I don't want to create a bunch more work for you, but that original design had something really nice about it :)

• The top left and across the top banner is sticking out to me a bit.. I think it might be the different tones of white for the rectangle and the banner coming out? maybe using the same color with a drop shadow might be nice? I also think it feels slightly imbalanced because you have the bottom banner going off the right side of the page, it feels like this one should do that on the left side somehow?

• I think the "fedora/design/community-design-team/issues#1" being on its own line in the banner is also feeling a little funky. I guess its so we can increase the number of the challenge as we do them and have plenty of space,.. maybe try a right alignment?

• I think we should add in a link or something for people to find out more info- that's TBD as I mentioned, but you could add in some placeholder text for a link

• With this more vectory design, I think it would be nice to add in that swirly texture in some capacity - the one we used for the summit event branding

I agreed with Marie and really appreciated her insight! I fixed the banner and text issues and got to incorporating the sketchiness of my earlier version.

I found this blog post by Nick Grunge with a free open-source texture pack. Before I started editing my draft properly, I played around and experimented with the different texture packs. I would definitely encourage you to bring them into Inkscape and try them out because I had a lot of fun.

Draft 3 - The poster with a texture overlaid on it

Draft 4 - The poster with a different texture overlaid

I achieved the dark blue background by turning the imported png from normal blend mode/layer to multiply or color burn. To get the texture to inverse from dark to light, I would have to group the entire design together at the end and use another inverse mask to make the texture white instead. Once I found my favorite texture pack it was time to lock everything else in.

Draft 4 - The poster with the final texture overlaid on it in white.

Final Poster Version + Variations

The three images above are the final artwork available in different formats to use for blog posts, banners, instagram and other social media. I really enjoy how they turned out as it pushed me in certain ways with Inkscape that I hadn’t used before.

My Own Take

Just because I created the poster trying to get others to engage in the art challenge, didn’t mean my work here was done. I started my own super hero design, with a mind map to get the ideas flowing of how I could represent a super hero that gave off the values of Open Source.

I could go in a few different ways.

1. Self Replication - The hero could duplicate themselves with clones that were all slightly different but can contribute to the fight against proprietary software.

2. Alternate Reality Creation - The hero fighting against their enemy would be able to stun them with visions of a different reality, helping shine a light on what the world could be with Open Source.

3. Access and Occlusion - The ability to open and close any security system with the blink of an eye.

4. Transparency - The hero could turn invisible. This seemed like the least able to relate to the Open Source way as we still want to be out there and visible with our work. Could be used for something else though.

I decided that it might be fun to do a super hero with powers of self replication with alternate reality creation. The actual appearance of the superhero was not as important to me. An Open Source super hero could have anyone behind the mask, and would most likely work with the team of other superheroes to fight against evil so I knew there were a lot of options for what they could look like.

I went for a simple sketch version in Krita and I’d love to make another version one day with this super hero (name pending?) and her team mates showing off their powers.

The Creative Freedom Summit is organizing another art challenge during October 2023 before our second conference in January 2024 so I encourage you to stay curious and get involved! If you’ve ever wanted to practice Inkscape, Krita or Blender (and countless others) then this is the event to stay up to date with :)

12/7/22 Status Update

Creative Freedom Summit

1) First version I very quickly drew up, playing off of the design team’s banner with the gradient. I think I’ll see what this looks like with the characters in full color.

2) Still playing around with the gradients and trying to incorporate all the other colors. The colors weren’t blending enough for me personally and I don’t like the centered layout of the logo and text.

3) This was the first one I was happy with. Added the shapes to try and lean into the playful creative side.

4) Wondered if the textured lines would be better kind of ebbing and flowing around the edges of the banner instead of coming out of the characters.

5) Essentially the dark version of #3. But I figured I’d play around with adding more texture to the green marker, the placement of ‘live’ and the shapes I include.

The Creative Freedom Summit in January is going to be recorded on Peertube and as such needs a specific banner for the videos.

Just went into Inkscape with the great logo and type svg designed by Jess Chitas and started playing around. Felt very satisfying and honestly wanted to keep going but figured it might be better to work on something else while people give feedback.

Oskar the Lion!

I don’t think I ever updated on here that the character I designed, to spread the good news of open source ways had their name chosen in a vote! *Drum roll please* they are called Oskar!

Along with the peertube banner I’m working on social media posts that can be formatted for multiple sites and Oskar would be a perfect addition to spice up the graphics! So the half finished svg file has been re opened and I gathered some inspo from the Fedora characters on what other poses/expressions might be helpful. It’s been super satisfying to make the svg file organized with a ton of layers and make Oskar like a digital paper doll. You can even drag their cheery facial expression off and replace it with a different one!

Miscellaneous etc.

Did some cleaning up in the epic for the Icon design project so Tanu can speed through the tickets. We discussed that she feels confident about being able to finish them all so we brainstormed some push goals if that does turn out to be the case.

Led the Design Team meeting on 12/7. Made sure to spend the first 10-15 minutes triaging one ticket and checking in on one that looked like it needed some attention. I gave feedback on the Anaconda logo redesign and loved seeing Emma’s Fedora cloud web page designs!

Hope everyone has a great week :) I just read this graphic novel Thieves by Lucie Bryon this week and it was so good! I might be biased since I’ve been consuming her art online for awhile. But it was inspiring to see the comic I’ve been seeing snippets of for years on social media, finally in my own hands.

11/16/22 Status Update

Hey everyone!

Happy November :)

A blog post featuring an image of four designers with different tools used to design to create the ‘Community Design Team’ text.

Community Design Team

Finished the graphic request for the blog post that Mo is writing to introduce the Community Design Team.

The blog post will lay out the team’s goals and why it’s important to have a team of designers working on upstream projects connected to CPE.

Continuing to brainstorm ideas and next steps for the Creative Freedom Summit. Including scheduling a Garctic telephone test session, starting the presentation on ‘How Fedora Uses Krita’, and brainstorming posts for social media.

Fedora Design Team

We met today on 11/16 as always at 1:30 - 2:15 EST. Feel free to join the group to chat here! We talked about how to contribute to F38 Wallpaper, contributions to the Qemu logo ticket, the Beefy Miracle vectorizing process, and the Fedora Build system icon. I took notes during the meeting and wrote feedback that was given to post into the ticket so it didn’t get lost in the meeting’s recording.

Fedora Wallpaper 38

Created a call for art visuals and got in contact with the Marketing team to share on either Twitter or Instagram - originally I had the wrong mascot in the design but Beefy Miracle makes a great edition and hopefully is just as excited as others to get involved in Fedora 38 wallpaper.

My next step is to play around with Blender and see what I can do with the old ideas I had for a rough wallpaper.

Outreachy Icons

Epic here. Out of the 43 icons and the month of contributions from Outreachy applicants, I have around 6 icons with final designs chosen. I reviewed all 43 tickets, and now it’s just to make sure the designers are alerted their work was accepted and the tickets are updated with the final png and SVG and potentially closed. Around 4 rooms have pre-existing logos that would work best for these.

Fedora Design Wiki Transfer

Ticket here. Reached out to the CPE team to get any advice about setting up a repo with a git post-commit hook from the group’s GitLab wiki to fedora docs. We’re going to be updating the info to have the Fedora brand guidelines, tools we use, suggestions for getting engaged, and documentation of Penpot.

The next step is playing around in asciidoc to get used to it.

Misc.

This week I felt really good about staying on track, writing down daily to-dos, and checking them off. Whenever I wasn’t able to get something done on a day it was added to the next day’s list. I’m looking forward to the Outreachy results going public next week :D!

My goal for the next week is to actually complete a session of blender or asciidoc on top of other work like creating an SVG sheet for the open-source character.

Thanks, everyone! Have a great rest of your week!

11/9/22 Weekly Update

Allo allo. This is a little late but from 11/2 - 11/9

Community Design Team

Last week the Community Design Team chose the second sketch I created to finalize for the blog post so I added two extra people to the design, and I lined and colored the visual in. Jess suggested the ‘Community Design Team’ text have a drop shadow like the ‘introducing the...’ box drop shadow.

Below includes the new drop shadow.

Design Team

Led the 11/9/22 design team at 1:30 - 2:15 EST. We’re always welcoming Fedora users who are interested in joining, feel free to join the group here! There’s a live participation link as well as a live stream if you just want to observe :)

Created an epic to document Fedora Design Docs with four tickets under it. Transfer Fedora Design Wiki to Gitlab, Outreachy Feedback Survey, Regular Status Reports, and Establish Regular Newbie tickets. I’m in charge of the first two issues primarily and want to keep a healthy eye on the second two. This week had my first test at doing ticket triage during a meeting while sharing my screen, we made sure to give the design request issues some attention. It’s moments like these where your screen freezes 😂

Each ticket within the epic will get tasks to break down the goal. I’m copying people’s responses for the Outreachy Survey feedback from Element to the ticket so it’s all organized and documented. I’m also reaching out to the CPE team to get advice for setting up the Fedora Design wiki transfer. During the design team, we decided realistically this work won’t be finished until March. We need to review, update, and migrate Fedora Design content so it is maintained on Fedora design’s gitlab in asciidoc, with a cloned repo so it can automatically update on the docs.fp.o site. And I’ve never created a repo or used asciidoc so lots to learn but I’m excited.

Outreachy

This is the link to the epic where this project lives.

From Wed 11/2 - Fri 11/4 I continued providing feedback to Outreachy applicants’ contributions, accepting certain icons that were 100% or 99% complete, that successfully followed the guidelines, and had a great design. Most tickets however did not have an accepted icon.

I answered questions at the end of the 11/2 design team meeting for Outreachy applicants. One of the major questions was regarding the timeline that applicants have to provide. It’s up to each applicant to figure out how they want to divide their 12-week internship to accomplish the project’s goal.

Since the final application was due on Friday, I looked over a few contributors’ final applications giving tips and feedback. After the deadline for submissions, I had access to everyone’s final application. I spent 11/7 - 11/9 reading the 21 contributor’s applications until the deadline on Wed at 11 am EST. I finally chose a person for the internship but they won’t know until Nov 21st. Honestly, it was a struggle. Out of the whole group, there was a good chunk of regular contributors who were all really interested in the project, with great technical skills, and a willingness to improve. But I had a list of reasons for choosing this person, and I trust my gut. I want to make sure everyone who wasn’t chosen though knows how welcome and encouraged they are to stay active in the Fedora Design team.

Misc.

I completed a self-evaluation this week which was really helpful for staying on track. I also completed also a tilt360 evaluation for Mo. For half of this week, I ended each day just feeling like I was slammed all day with things to do. The other days were still full of work but not as slammed.

Happy November everyone! :D

11/2/22 Weekly Update

This is going to be mostly for 10/26 - 11/2 but with some other background information from other things I worked on in October.

We are Red Hat Week happened last week which was super fun! On 10/26 I attended the emerging OS CY22Q3 celebration to play bingo and get updates. On Thursday 10/27 I was in the Boston office and joined the Crayons to Cradle group, packing hygiene kits for kids ages 3-12 and coloring pieces of paper for them. Really great to see everyone from around Red Hat.

Community Design Team

The community design team is organizing lots of fun things. The Fedora community blog will hopefully have a monthly blog post from the team and needs a graphic to go along with it (ideas sketched out by yours truly below).

Plans for the Creative Freedom Summit will be shared soon, and I will be hosting a game session as well as a talk about how Fedora Uses Krita. The ticket to organize that will be here and here on the fedora discussion.

The sketches below were some concept art for the Open Up game. Just to get a kind of feel of the world and help those working on the project.

This sketch was for the podman desktop team to try and visualize an illustration in a space.

Fedora 38

These are some idea sketches for Fedora 38. Very fitting since Fedora 37 Launch party is this weekend!

Outreachy

This Friday, November 4th is the application deadline for Outreachy. For the past four weeks, the applicants have been contributing to the Fedora Design sphere and tickets for the internship. The teams on the fedora server need cohesive icons, that still distinguish them from other teams.

I led the design team meeting from 1:30 PM EST - 3:15 PM EST on 10/26. For the first 30 minutes we went over design work from myself and Jess for the regular design team issues, and the rest was dedicated to Outreachy. Below are the icons that I created before to include in the project proposal. The project’s epic lives here on gitlab.

A lot of really great work has been produced in such a short time and it’s going to be tough to choose just one person for the internship but I’m looking forward to the next step. Hopefully, those who don’t get chosen for Outreachy but still have an interest in the fedora design team will stay close by contributing regardless.

My main tasks in this stage have been providing answers to questions that cover a wide range, of design in general, the icons, how to do things in Inkscape, and how applicants’ work will be documented for the final application. Before the deadline tomorrow I plan on spending some time seeing which icons in the tickets are worthy of being chosen as the final icon so applicants can record whether or not their contribution was accepted.

Hope everyone had an amazing October and see you back with an update next week.

Fedora 38 Wallpaper in motion!

Fedora 38 Wallpaper Process Starting

Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash

That’s right!!! We are officially ready to start brainstorming for Fedora 38 Wallpaper ideas because our candidate with an M last name has been chosen (drum roll please) and it’s Samuel Massie!!!

Ideas and progress are going to be documented on gitlab here!

Thank you to everyone who voted and gave comments on the candidates! It’s greatly appreciated! After choosing our inspiration, we had a brainstorming session for figuring out different paths we could go down together. We met on Wednesday, September 21st at the design team meeting which was 1:30-2:30 PM EST*

*This is our usual time slot which we will continue to use for most of the future sessions. If you can’t make this time of the week, feel free to tune into the recording or are nervous about participating, join the Livestream to watch only.

---

To recap, Samuel Massie was a chemist who studied a variety of chemicals that contributed to the development of therapeutic drugs, including the chemistry of phenothiazine. As an African American scientist, it was hard for him to find work as easily as white colleagues and to avoid being drafted- worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed atomic bombs in World War II.

This presents a few different paths we could go in, as well as some that we want to avoid since they’ve been done before for past wallpapers.

We took our time looking into the various parts of his background, learning he originally studied chemistry because he wanted to cure his father’s asthma, and reading articles by his grandaughter where she admits how she wrestles with his legacy as a groundbreaking Black chemist… whose works also contributed to thousands of deaths with the atomic bomb.

Themes we thought about included, glowing things that are beautiful but dangerous, we are all the same, with visuals of repeating lines or pointillism.

Below is the mind map we created together in our brainstorm session!

1. Beauty in Death / Contrast Visual

We found inspiration from holocaust memorials that are eerily beautiful while reminding the visitor about the gruesome deaths involved. It made us think of other visuals that are beautiful but dangerous like jellyfish, volcanoes, uranium glassware, and the fireflies from the movie ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ that also resemble sparks and ash from the bombing. “Beautiful toxic like lead and uranium- should look beautiful, repeating sameness but separate.”

2. False Dichotomy We are all the Same

Oftentimes throughout history, humanity forgets that we are all the same.

3. Butterfly Effect

Massie working and not directly witnessing the effects across the world. Without his work where would we be now? The small ripples and after effects. Remote presence is increasing, pushing towards container technology and how we’re all connected even though we never meet.

All three of these themes can be woven together and don’t have to be separate at all! They’re simply to encourage what to think of next.

Next steps:

Going forward anyone who wants to be involved is encouraged to pursue whichever avenue they’re the most interested in and work on some thumbnail sketches (they are supposed to get the creative juices flowing with ideas not overly detailed) to figure out some potential compositions.

:D Please have fun with this and don’t feel restricted by any of the topics discussed above! Any other ideas are welcomed.

And one last reminder that the ticket issue is on gitlab here!

Photo by Pat Whelen on Unsplash

Photo by Shawn Appel on Unsplash

Start of Sep Update

Wow its been a little bit since an update-

One update is that this Lion character has been vectorized!

But even this image needs some final details. Lines on the ruler and pencil. A line for the toe on the left foot. Add some space between the coffee mug and the pocket to get rid of the tangent. Shift the mane a little over to the right. And finally, add the name of the Lion on the hello tag. Voting for the name is over here!

The next step for the lion would be making a sticker sheet so anyone who wants to make a banner or design with them, would have multiple expressions and ability to kind of position the lion in inkscape like a paper doll.

I’ve led a few design team meetings recently which has been great!

Another project I’ve been working on is creating a set of 10 icons for Fedora Element chat, which will lead to making a project proposal for Outreachy to get a design intern to work on the rest of them! Which will be cool.

I got some feedback- for the colors for the different groups, purple is going to change to administrative, magenta to the design mindshare group, and yellow to events. As well as a reminder that the icons don’t need to be too simple like paper cut art, they just need to differentiate the different rooms and spaces.

Fedora 37 Beta Wallpaper Update

The night and day versions for Beta release need some feedback before we choose our final version to be packaged. Please feel free to leave constructive feedback

Day Option 1 - the eco city in daylight

Day Option 2 - light streaming through the sky

Night Option 1 - stars in sky

Night Option 2 - stars and satellites moving through sky

Jess Chitas was able to test the first day option on her desktop as seen below:

6/15/22 Weekly Update

An update with all the visuals I’ve been working on.

Below is the final fedora pride banner that I came up with. Underneath it is almost all the iterations that I got feedback on from the design team. It took awhile to get there, especially because Fedora’s design branding is pretty simple. When you involve all the flags colors, keeping the text over it readable and in line with previous branding, it got a little frustrating. But I’m so happy with how it turned out and thanks to everyone who gave feedback!

And just so everyone knows, there’s going to be a Fedora Pride Social hour soon in the element matrix social channel!

Casual stuff here. Mister Lion in his final colors, unless I get feedback from other design team members that he needs something else. The yellow is in my opinion, a perfect post it note yellow, perfect to write ideas on. The warmer orange spots are just the red brought down to a lower opacity over the yellow. He’s ready to be vectorized and start advocating for open source resources for all!

Working on Fedora 37 wallpapers details. The bedroom needs some more believable background elements to make the viewer know this is a proper vintage 40’s room. The original thumbnail didn’t have a bed frame, so that and a proper window frame have been added. Currently searching for the right lamp and radio references, and I might have to zoom out a bit more so that it doesn’t feel too cluttered.

Fedora 37 Wallpaper

Image by Alin Biju provided by pexels.com.

We are officially in the process of working on Fedora 37 wallpaper! Our candidate with an L last name has been chosen and it’s Hedy Lamarr!!!

Ideas and progress are going to be documented on pagure, issue 812.

Hedy Lamarr was a film actress and inventor. In World War II, Lamarr and George Anthiel developed a radio guidance system for torpedos that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology so that the Allied powers could avoid the threat of jamming from the Axis powers.

The principles of their work was incorporated into GPS technology and Bluetooth, and are similar to methods in legacy versions of Wi-Fi and CDMA.

So we started brainstorming, thinking of the 1940s, radios, frequencies, the world, and much more shown below in our mindmap.

At the end of the session we agreed, that there was essentially four different routes we could go down.

1. 1980s Electric

In the 1980s radio helped shape the decade’s taste in music as well as the advancements in technology. We discussed visuals that were more obvious like 80s boomboxes and radios from that time, to MTV visuals that leaned into the bright colors and electric looks.

2. Glitchy Waves/Electricity

Building off the electric MTV looks we discussed pieces of art like the Matrix that has electric colors like the 80s color palette, that could also glitch like the frequencies hopping in Lamarr’s invention.

3. 1940’s Vintage

We also discussed the time period when these inventions by Lamarr were created in. The 1940s has a very distinct aesthetic, and we agreed muted color tones with radio towers and other imagery could do well inspired by Lamarr.

4. Eco-utopia

When thinking about the combination of the 1940s and the 1980s and their aesthetics merging together we thought about the idea of Eco-Utopias which were dreamed about happening in the 21st century earlier in the 20th century. Cities designed with nature at the forefront, tying communities to greenery and hopefully resulting in a better healthier world.

These are a combination of thumbnails made by myself (Madeline Peck), Jess Chitas, and Emma Kidney exploring the possibilities. Thumbnails are a great way to share quick ideas that can be hard to describe in words and multiple ways to attack the same idea. On the left column is the same bedroom with different color palettes and different outsides.

We knew we could merge our ideas together. They didn’t have to be entirely separate. The suggestion of having the bedroom in one time frame like the 1940s, while the window looks out onto the 1980s or some future, was suggested.

The next step includes gathering reference photos for composition and 1940s interiors to create a more detailed cleaned up sketch, and possible options for what the window will look out onto.

On the bottom right you can see how the thumbnail sketch has changed into a different color palette and has more of the 1940s details inside.

Join us at our next design team meeting on June 1st at 1:30 PM EST to share ideas and feedback with the rest of the team.

Fedora 36 Beta Update

The final F36 day and night beta wallpapers are here! Take a look below and let us know what your thoughts are!

Day version of the wallpaper download here

Night version of the wallpaper download here.

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We last left off with the beta versions of the wallpaper that were created in Krita, which can be found here with their design process explained.

We received a lot of great feedback including suggestions for a strictly night version with the moon glowing instead of a sunset, adding butterflies to the day version, as well as shifting some of the clouds around so they didn’t stack and make the right side of the wallpaper too heavy. The previous version is below in Day, Sunset, and Night mode.

After the first beta wallpapers were completed we were able to start to play around in Blender. Máirín Duffy created the image below demonstrating the idea of the glass planes layered in front of each other with a light source.

Máirín then moved on to approximating something that resembled the previous versions.

Here are some of the tutorials she followed:

Creating the grass (just green hair particles. Couldn't use the texture they cite because the scale is off, blades of grass are the size of the trees, and couldn't figure out how to scale the texture) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOS9k6kqBsc

Creating the glass materials - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtfNtpJa3hU

Creating the clouds - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPAYX8z9i8M

She noted there were some issues,

”The grass looks horrible like green hair on a bald person! I had the material as a base green color and that stopped working.
I have a pretty nice, blue cloud off on the side. That could be duplicated to make the real clouds white. I colored it blue thinking I'd put it inside the front light blue water to make it look cloudy.
The middle blue glass does not shine through the front blue glass... it's as if it's not there. But the green mountain layer does shine through. I can't figure out why.
The lighting is a train wreck.” - Máirín

Our blender expert Micah Dunn was able to start playing around and pulled the textures from the first beta versions in a simpler manner.

Experimenting with how thick the panes of glass should be.

The Fedora Design Team meets once a week and if you want you can watch the recording from March 9th’s recording here at the 16:30 minute mark.

Until this final version of the day wallpaper was produced!

The F36 default wallpaper in Fedora 36 uses a new feature called light/dark mode, where you can put your entire desktop into a light or dark mode and the wallpaper lightens or darkens to match the desktop UI.

You will need a build of Fedora 36 to test the wallpapers alongside this new functionality, but you can also just download and set the wallpapers from this blog post on any version of Fedora or any desktop to test them out as wallpapers.

If you are a beta tester for Fedora 36 or would like to test this wallpaper's light/dark functionality, the update with the new artwork is here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2022-30419fe922

If you have the testing updates repository enabled on your system, you should be able to grab it by simply running 'sudo dnf update f36-backgrounds -y'

You can grab the latest Workstation ISO for F36 here: https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/36/latest-Fedora-36/compose/Workstation/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-36_Beta-1.4.iso

You can run this in a VM tool such as GNOME Boxes on Fedora, and once it is booted, open a terminal and run 'sudo dnf update f36-backgrounds -y'

Simply, you'll be able to install the update with the following command:

sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --advisory=FEDORA-2022-30419fe922

Leave your feedback here on fedoraproject.org.

Mid February Update

Well! The biggest update is the day and night versions have been finalized for the beta release of Fedora 36. Obviously we chose Deepika Kurup to inspire the wallpaper and had a mind map session as well as some thumbnails that steered us in the right direction.

We kept in mind the concepts we’d talked about at our first mind mapping session, Nature/Water Cycle, Transparency/Reflection, and Filter/Purification. Eventually we discussed an artist called Nobuhiro Nakanishi, who’s layered artwork uses rectangular glass plates to create immersive landscapes that form a wide landscape.

Mo proposed, “layered shaped glass textured landscape, maybe vertically taller than Cathedral Dusk to show layers of ocean or layers of soil beneath.”

I could draw the landscape’s textures to hand over to Micah who could take them into blender. Like an artist creating a fabric’s design, and handing over the finished fabric to someone who can drape it on the mannequin into an outfit.

I came up with the abstract landscape below based off the surrounding inspiring imagery. Each part of the landscape would be partially transparent pane and because it was digital, we could have clouds and parts that wouldn’t logistically make sense in the real world.

So where were we last week? I had the general landscape figured out, some of the trees blocked in with leaves texture, but the three blocks of land and water still needed attention and I was having a tough time rendering the clouds.

So I decided to just turn that layer off so I could hopefully come up with a better cloud rendering.

To create this landscape in Krita, I used a bunch of clipping layers. For example with the grass. I used the selection tool to draw a shape, used the bucket tool to fill it, and then you do ctrl shift g to create a clipping group folder. Once the clipping layer is on you can only draw on that shape. If you try to draw outside of the shape it won’t show up. And the beauty of it is you can have multiple clipping layers on an object.

Which is great because if you want to change an aspect of it later on, like the base color to be darker or a different color it won’t erase all your hard work painting the texture.

Instead of making cloud shapes with the bucket tool and painting within that shape- I decided to use a transparent brush to softly bring them to life and keep them lighter and loose.

The background clouds were the first ones I was happy with and once I added the fake light source in the back it started to pull a lot of the elements together. Having that common theme of a little yellow light was helpful.

Then Mo reminded me that it needed a different dimension so the canvas size had to be changed.

Lots of little changes went on in between these two images. Added the front clouds, the little fish, the rest of the trees, the leaves texture, and more detail in the grass.

For the night version, I thought about taking it into gimp but because I already had all the elements in individual folders I started off by just duplicating the file. And since most of them had masking layers I could either change the base color, like with the sky, or I could just add a blue tint over the whole part.

Each pane got different levels of blue to try and keep the levels of contrast. I moved the fish to imply they were swimming somewhere different now, as well as the clouds.

I’ve already gotten a great amount of feedback on both of these! Taking this night version, which is honestly more like a dusk version, and making the sun into the moon to take it full nighttime mode has been suggested. Moving the clouds on the right so it’s not such a heavy stack of clouds is going to happen.

And for the day version playing around with the blue sky, potentially adding butterflies or birds, and looking at the trees on the right to see if they work better as islands over the blue water instead of being enveloped by the wave.

I worked on a few other things but this was the majority of my past week so wanted to lay it all out :)

Fedora 36 Wallpaper!

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

That’s right!!! We are officially ready to start brainstorming for Fedora 36 Wallpaper ideas because our candidate with a K last name has been chosen (drum roll please) and it’s Deepika Kurup!!!

Ideas and progress are going to be documented on pagure, issue 789.

To recap, Deepika Kurup is an inventor, scientist, and clean water advocate.

Kurup's initial idea that won her the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist in 2012 is based on using a photocatalytic compound for water purification. In 2015 she developed a pervious photocatalytic composite using sand, TiO2, Portland cement, and silver nitrate. This photocatalytic pervious composite showed 98% reduction in total coliform bacteria immediately after filtration. Exposure of the filtered water to sunlight with a photocatalytic composite disc resulted in 100% inactivation of total coliform bacteria.

This has a lot of different paths we could go in! Playing around with whether we wanted a landscape that emphasized the sun and water like Fedora 34, or if we wanted to symbolize bacteria in a way with the water in a gradient effect going from dirty to clean. A few of our voters commented that this is globally meaningful, and exploring the element of water and the inventor presents a new generation.

Thank you to everyone who voted and gave comments on the candidates! It’s greatly appreciated!

The next step was a brainstorming session for figuring out different paths we could go down together. So we met on Wednesday, November 3rd at the design team meeting which was 1:30-2 PM EST?*

*This is our usual time slot which we will continue to use for most of the future sessions. But if you can’t make this time of the week, feel free to call and host another brainstorm session if there is a more compatible different time slot! Or if the majority of people who want to attend can’t meet then we can move the time slot.

1. Nature/Water Cycle

Some ideas were a physical landscape where land and water meet. It was brought up that we could leave an easter egg of trees from previous wallpapers. Marie also brought up the idea of dew droplets. Especially since Kurup’s invention involves hollow glass microspheres, so the droplets could represent both water and the shape of the microspheres.

2. Transparency/Reflection

Water’s transparency was brought up as a visual element to play around with. Transparency is also key in Fedora’s OpenSource process.

Either one or more reflective orbs being the end result of the filtered process reflecting the world around us and the clean ending.

3. Filter/Purification

Mo brought up how water gets filtered so it’s easy to digest, the same way Fedora is which results in it being the better “purified” desktop. We discussed particles and elements being filtered out potentially in a gradient abstractly or concrete representation.

We talked about how this invention and the ability to filter particles out of the water, mirrors our necessity to filter air when it comes to covid, and how it offers hope.

Next steps:

Going forward anyone who wants to be involved is encouraged to pursue whichever avenue they’re the most interested in and work on some thumbnail sketches (they are supposed to get the creative juices flowing with ideas not overly detailed) to figure out some potential compositions.

:D Please have fun with this and don’t feel restricted by any of the topics discussed above! Any other ideas are welcomed.

And one last reminder that the ticket issue is #789 on pagure!!

Week 3 & 4

June 16, 2021 - Wed

Decided to combine two weeks into one blog post because unfortunately my grandmother passed away on the 4th and I took some time off to help and be with my family.

Last week I was able to talk to Gabbie about the details for the Research Podcast thumbnails! Super exciting but I’m just awaiting the reference photos of the first few guests and then I can draw up a proper schedule.

I’ve been chugging along on the Kubernetes coloring book.

I’ve been coming up with some designs for the Open Studio Swag t shirt contest! I got feedback from Mo about which ones were stronger and these two were part of the sketch phase. I just need to make a vector file of both of them for Friday. But some other interns said the sketchiness of the tree one is charming so I might try and see if I can keep that when I convert it.

I’ve also been doing a lot of small housekeeping things, like adding a signature to my Gmail finally, going into Workday, and adding a personal statement as well as skills. I talked with Joe from the talent acquisition team this week about a permanent job at Red Hat in September!

I worked on the new pride fedora logo and I came up with these below but honestly, they were relatively simple. Going over the previous ticket there was some debate about how much could be done with the logo, and my skills with Inkscape are still slowwwww and simple since I use it for drawing the majority of the time. Honestly, the worst thing is when you know it’s possible to do something in a program but not sure how, and Google is your best friend. But the ticket is here and Mo has come up with some really great variations!

Have a great rest of your work this week!

-Madeline

Summer Intern Restart Up

Red Hat Internship Round 2 for Summer 2021 is officially under way! Last summer it was a new and fairly wild time especially with covid being fully remote and starting at Red Hat. But this first week actually included a four day weekend, as well as a lot of new hire intern orientation meetings. Some open source, kubernetes, and red hat products bootcamps also sprinkled in there.

In between meetings and bootcamps I’ve been going over how much of the coloring book to get done so I can finish as much as possible by the end of June- and I’ve attached below one of the pages I completed this week.

This summer I’m working on some illustrations for the Red Hat Research Team Podcast, as well as a comic strip to explain open source licensing to creatives (to help make the case for them to open license their work). As well as the element matrix wallpaper which I’ve been trying to reformat so the login bubble that will go in the middle wont cover too much of the design.

I’m attending design team meetings as well as Open Studio team meetings and finally getting in the feel of being back full time! Happy new month and Happy Pride!

-Madeline

January Blog Post (New Year New Bloggin!)

It’s been quite awhile since I posted an update on here! December and the beginning of January I spent working on the final pieces for my illustration thesis, as well as the process book that captured my research and how they were all created. You can check out the finished book here at madelinepeck.adobe.com. Super happy with how it turned out and now I can turn to other cool projects!

I’ve been continuing my work for the coloring book. I’ve been experimenting using the bezier tool with the pen vector tool, as it really helps with the roundness and closed lines coloring books tend to have. The pages are always more detailed then I remembered having planned for but that’s alright, perhaps I’ll just need to make some compromises and remember that no one will have access to the secret super version that lives inside my brain.

On the side I’ve also been working on the thumbnails for the Element background wallpaper.

This is what I’ve come up so far for ideas, and I’m looking forward to taking them into the proper sized folder and seeing how I can clean these ideas up for the final version. I also am going to start some other design work for the rest of the app :D

Today I actually also attended the super low key design team video chat, which involved a brain storm session for Fedora 35 that was exciting!

So Madeline... what have you been up to?

I don’t know! Okay that’s not true, but sometimes the brain doesn’t work. An average course level for a semester is 5 classes, and I’m taking 4 since I was able to get credit for my internship. Which I’m super grateful for because it’s a lot to handle in a pandemic, in classes where it requires a lot more motivation and a new way of doing things, on top of also keeping apartment and yourself clean and fed. Two of my classes are for Thesis, one is my 400 level class Eating and the Environment, and then my elective is Watercolor.

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Watercolor

For every project we start off with basic small thumbnail drawings or loose sketches, and in Watercolor we usually start off with a value sketch.

With children’s books I know that authors can start the book process with the story/plot, or even just one image they then build off.

I had the general idea of what might happen in the story- some images of what I might draw, but then I needed to write the story before any real planning. With picture books it doesn’t make sense to do one drawing and then plan the next. You have to plan the whole book, progressing as a whole for it to look cohesive at the end. Or maybe you don’t. But I do.

But the text and the images play a huge role together, so I needed the base of the story before I translated it to visuals.

This was an assignment where we had to do a monochrome macro and micro version of a still life with strong lighting, so I chose my window sill with some plants, a rock salt lamp, and a little 3D printed BMO.

And then we had to choose one of them to do in full color, (doing a little color study in my sketchbook) and then the final, which I was quite happy with how it turned out!

Our next assignment is an interior/exterior, with the piece showing a little of both and I did six thumbnail options for it. Then cleaner lines, and a digital color study before transferring the line art to watercolor paper.

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Thesis

In simplest terms, for Illustration Thesis we create a body of work with a theme and topics to research to deepen the meaning of our pieces. And at the end of the semester we create a book that captures the process. So you could create eight paintings and that’s your thesis. Mine is a picture book, so I have a narrative that the pieces need to tie to. It’s about a witch who falls in love, and how love is a type of magic on its own.

Some authors start the book process with one drawing idea that they can build a story around, or they have the story vaguely planned out. For me I had the general idea of what could happen, with a few visuals in mind.

It’s not like I could just finish an entire piece and then start the next one and hope they all seemed cohesive. So it was important for me to write out the plot before I planned the whole project though. Once the text was done I could figure out how it was laid out on the page and how the image related to it. The visuals and text play an important role together.

This sketchbook page for example, I wanted the image to show the two girls dancing sweetly in the kitchen, sun streaming in. And the feedback I got from my class was that #2 was their favorite because it was very intimate.

I took the first page of the book’s drawing that I had sketched out, put some colors under it to capture the vibe but then the next step was to clean it up and make it cleaner with more detail in a color study below.

Thank you for reading this far! I hope October is treating you well. It’s my favorite month right now.

Fall I love you <3

September Blog Post

Happy Wednesday everyone!

I’ve shifted from working full time hours during the summer at Red Hat, to working ten hours (give or take) part time remotely while I’m starting classes again. I’ve decided to also chat about my thesis work on here, and I’m still deciding whether or not to make their own posts on the off weeks in between my intern posts, simply because neither probably has enough to talk about every week.

Let’s catch up though. The latest thing that’s been on my mind preparing for a sketch note session today on Hopin for a research talk, from 1:30-2:30 EST by Jose Renau and Karsten Wade. So basically Jose will be giving a talk about Live Hardware Development at UCSC and Karsten will help lead the conversation, and then at 2:00 it will be an open round table discussion. While they talk and give their slides virtually, there will be artists sketching on screen about the topic, which is my job.

On Friday I met with Heidi Dempsey, Sarah Coghlan, and Mo Duffy to go over the website and program and make sure we were all sure how it was going to work. During that session these were the doodles I came up with. I’m very intrigued by super heroes and detectives who are the champions of code and besides drawing what I imagined Sarah’s dog, and Heidi, that filled up the page pretty much.

I’ve been working on some doodles for ChRIS as well as the illustrations for the coloring book.