This article is the start pointing for coordinating the effort to have good official artwork for next releases on the Debian Desktop.

General Ideas

The artwork should be pleasant, yet unintrusive. Ideally, it should work well with the default user interface of the three major desktops: GNOME, KDE and Xfce; but there's also room for more generic Debian related artwork like t-shirts, labels, system sounds and screenshots.

To this end, we need screenshots of the default theme for those desktops for artists to base their work on. Artwork should consist of a coherent set of boot splash, display manager background/theme, icons, login splash, desktop background and logout dialogs.

Further targets are specific application splash screens like OpenOffice.org's, gimp's etc., and maybe an ASCII art logo for the 'linuxlogo' package.

There could be a set of CD/DVD labels plus covers.

The <strike>[http://debblue.debian.net/debblue.php Debblue]</strike>(~~~ link is broken ?) theme is a example for what should be done with some artwork elements cited above.

DebianArt : artwork proposals

We are using the [http://www.debianart.org/ DebianArt] portal to select Debian specific artwork.

DebianArt is a place for high quality artwork and themes for the Debian Desktop. The idea is use the website for contests, creating an archive of user contributed artwork that can be freely used and included in upcoming Debian releases.

All old proposal had been moved to DebianArt.

DebianArt.org TODO

Artwork requirements

The artwork should have the following constraints:

Environment screenshots

Specifics Debian screenshots are in [http://www.debianart.org DebianArt.org].

Join us

Join us at [http://lists.debian.org/debian-desktop debian-desktop mailing list].

Debian Desktop Artwork Online Meetings

1st Meeting: 5 Sep (Tue) 20:00UTC (irc.oftc.net - #debian-meeting)

The agenda was:

See the [http://people.debian.org/~stratus/debian-desktop/artwork-meetings/1st-artwork-meeting.log full log]

Summary posted by Bart Cornelis (cobaco) on debian-desktop mailing list:

items discussed and their summary:

1. How are we handling login screen, wallpapers and splash screens

2. Template images/guidelines for login screens, wallpapers and splash screens

3. desktop-base or multiple source packages

4. Roadmap for Etch and Etch+1

The tango issue

The [http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project Tango Desktop] could provide a starting point for making consistent artwork across desktop environments present in Debian.

Ubuntu has already packaged [http://packages.ubuntu.com/icon-naming-utils icon-naming-utils] and [http://packages.ubuntu.com/src:tango-icon-theme tango-icon-theme].

MichaelBanck: Tango is currently not considered DFSG-free (it is under a CC license I believe). If this changes before etch, we could consider using Tango as a unified icon theme, if all DE teams agree.

?JossMouette: you cannot just switch icon themes for all desktop environments. It needs serious regression testing as it implies thousands of icons. GNOME tried to switch to the Tango naming scheme for 2.14 but failed. We'll fail as well if we try to use Tango with GNOME 2.14. GNOME 2.16 should be compatible with Tango, but it will probably not be straightforward. I don't know if KDE and Xfce are compatible with the Tango naming scheme.

YvesAlexisPerez: Xfce 4.4 will have its icon theme (xfce4-icon-theme package) use Tango (Inherits: Tango in index.theme).


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