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!

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.

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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

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!!