Debian Design team BoF 2017-08-06
- Design culture in Debian
- Welcome new designers into Debian - both users and developers
- Debian used for design work
- Find and package design-related FLOSS tools
- Maintain a blend optimized for designers to use
- Assets
- Find and package existing Free design assets
- Maintain a platform for creating and curating Free design assets
- Locate and/or author documentation of designing assets using Free tools
- Streamlining
- Improve designability during package installation
- Improve design in Debian
* Points brought up during intro round
- Relate accessibility to design and vice versa
- Translations (not Debian specific)
- Improve the communication Way-of-working (don't limit to e-mail and IRC)
- but also Web forums and modern communciation channels
- Design stability (escaping the upgrade treadmill / users not wanting to
- to learn UIs because they'll change anyway)
- needs for a design paradigm can go away, and so will the blends or
- interfaces
- forking blends as a nursery for design ideas where experimentation is
- freeer and can later be upstreamed into main
- gather ideas / problem statements to be passed on to upstreams rather
- than implementing solutions ourselves
- don't implement stuff in Debian which are upstream issues
- language barrier in Debian contribution (eg. NM process; also cultural
- differences (mailing lists and IRC vs forum and social network))
- solicit input from non-developers whose understanding of how software
- works is different from that of technical users
* Thoughts:
- Where are design issues located?
- - widget toolkits (GTK-X, Qt-Y, ...)
- (i.e. 5 different printer dialogs on the same desktop)
- not directly related to the corresponding desktop's theming) to
- - widget toolkits (GTK-X, Qt-Y, ...)
python-typing imagemagick-6.q16 librsvg2-bin etc. theming
- - general artwork (like current desktop-base package)
-> grub bootloader, plymouth, backgrounds
- What of the above can we address in Debian directly (without or with
- only a little upstreaming)?
- - general artwork - pick a certain theme per desktop and per widget toolkit
- make things look similar, do this for all desktops available in Debian
-> i.e. choose a combination of existing design patters)
- are to be used)
- visually (or otherwise)
- make things look similar, do this for all desktops available in Debian
- - general artwork - pick a certain theme per desktop and per widget toolkit
- only a little upstreaming)?
* Who can do what?
- Designers:
- - provide/recommend combinations of themes (that already exist in Debian
- or outside Debian)
- more "design" packages
- alone will cause stagnation. Underlying apps will always go stale.
- - package themes recommended by "the designers" - integrate hooks into to-be-themed packages that pick up "design
- information" from the designers and patch upstream's defaults "somehow"
- - accept patches from packagers that ease design modifications
- on the downstream side
- - provide/recommend combinations of themes (that already exist in Debian
What we can not or hardly do as distro maintainers?
- Fixing the 5 different printing dialogs is probably tricky... (and all
- similar issues regarding to different technologies used for programming desktop and such)
Resources
- infinote://gobby.debian.org/debconf17/bof/design
See also
Debconf event page (with video recording)
--- This page was derived from https://gobby.debian.org/export/debconf17/bof/design