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!