Unpackaged Font of the Week: Comic Serif Pro
Comic Serif Pro is another fun font – it’s a slab serif font useful for headlines and other creative treaments – including comic books. 
I actually found out about the font from my ever-awesome fellow FOSS artist pal Ryan Lerch, who showed me a comic mockup he’d made using it. I contacted the creator, Hannes von Döhren, who very graciously not only agreed to relicense the font under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, he also similarly licensed the rest of his impressive set of free fonts under CC-BY-3.0. (If you enjoy them, please consider giving Hannes a PayPal contribution on his site or consider purchasing from his collection of beautiful non-free fonts to show your appreciation.)
- Fedora Font Wishlist Entry: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/HVD_Comic_Serif_fonts
- Upstream Homepage: http://www.hvdfonts.com/freefonts.php
So, you want to package HVD Comic Serif Pro?
Holy cow! You’re awesome! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:
Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:
And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:
Last week’s font
Last week’s font was Sniglet by Haley Fiege. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?
Unpackaged Font of the Week Posts
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Fedora 12 rocks on tablets
(That’s Fedora 12 Beta’s Inkscape on my Thinkpad x61 with a built-in Wacom digitizer in the photo. Photo credit David Aquilina, CC-BY-3.0)
Got a tablet, or want to get one, but not sure it’s going to work out in Linux? Here’s how my Thinkpad x61’s built-in Wacom tablet works in Fedora 12 Beta:
- Tablet pressure sensitivity out-of-the-box, no xorg.conf needed! (Well okay, so that’s been the case for a couple Fedora releases now
) - Cellwriter provides handwriting recognition text input (no more having to flip the tablet back to keyboard mode just for one stupid little thing.)
- Xournal is great for taking notes & signing documents. No more print, sign, and re-scan; I can just sign emailed digital documents on screen and email them right back.
- Gimp brush dynamics effects rock – they’re the secret to achieve quite a few of the effects in the Fedora 12 wallpaper designs.
- The new Inkscape in Fedora 12 has a cool new feature that allows you to create your own brushes and save them or choose from a collection of preset brushes.
Fedora is truly committed to software freedom. Enjoy great features like this without the guilt. Try Fedora 12 RC3 today. Or wait until Fedora 12 final comes out:
Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Sniglet
Sniglet is a fun rounded, sans-serif font useful for headlines and other creative treaments. The font was created by Haley Fiege, and it supports a full Latin character set including accent marks (Haley notes both Icelandic and French are supported.) (P.S. Haley’s got some other great fonts for sale on dafont.com that you might want to give a try if you like Sniglet!)
- Fedora Font Wishlist Entry: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/TLOMT_Sniglet_fonts
- Upstream Homepage: http://www.kingdomofawesome.com/sniglet.php
So, you want to package Sniglet?
Super! You’re totally kickin’! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:
Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:
And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:
Last week’s font
Last week’s font was Bola by Pablo Caro. Edward (AKA tk009) has again stepped up as he did for Tiza and has already packaged it and submitted a font package review request for Bola. (Fedora wiki font request page.) Both the Tiza font package review request and the Bola font package review request are waiting on someone to review them, so if you’ve got the time and inclination, please help out!
Thanks again to Edward for helping Fedora expand our inclusion of all the awesome openly-licensed fonts out there!
(P.S. I had a bit of a WordPress malfunction (I am so accustomed to implicit apply but apparently in schedule changes WordPress requires an explicit apply action) so there was a 15 minute window today during which you may have gotten a little sneak preview of another font I may post about it the future. )
Planet can be annoying.
WordPress posted a draft a week early by accident. Planet will not forget unless I keep that post but erase the content.
So here I am replacing that post with random content to get the posted-too-early post off Planet.
Spins Bling Update
Thanks to the feedback you gave me on the last Spins bling post, I’ve been able to make some updates and adjustments to some of the Spins banners.
The artwork for the Education spin banner was pretty sad, so I updated it with artwork from María’s awesome Education SIG wallpaper:
BrOffice’s name was too grey and hard to read so it’s been updated to an easier-to-read blue:
The KDE artwork in the KDE banner was a little old so it’s been updated with the Oxygen logo as well as the KDE slogan:
Joerg alerted me to the fact I’d missed the Security spin, but it was easy enough to come up with a banner as María again already had created arwork that I simply had to pull in:
Also… made some mini-banners for the spins directory. Here’s a preview:
Thanks for all the feedback! By the way, sijis and hiemanshu have really been rockin’ on the spins.fedoraproject.org redesign. Wait until you see it…. they deserve huge kudos!
Spin Banner Bling
If you ever need to work with the Fedora Spins SIG on a project, you’re in for a treat because they’ve totally got it together and it’s really easy to work with them.
My task was to gather some content for each spin’s page for the new spins.fedoraproject.org design, and typically in these sorts of projects it involves a lot of back and forth and pulling teeth to get the content, craft the content into a usable form, and organize and make all the content available. I asked the spin owners to just get the content to me any way they could, and to my delight organized the content into individual spin details wiki pages so that myself and the websites team (word to hiemanshu and sijis who’ve been cranking out the HTML and CSS!) could easily find it and use it. That made our job a whole lot easier, so thanks Spins SIG!
Anyhow, here’s the current try at making some nice banners to personalize each spin’s details page:
Each of these banners will slide into the space below the blue Fedora bar on the spins details page. For example, here’s the Fedora Electronic lab banner in context:
Anyway, I hope you like these designs. Let us know what you think – there’s still time to tweak them.
Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Bola
“Bola” means ball in Spanish, and it’s a pretty accurate name considering the ball-shaped letters of Bola, a chunky and geometric decorative font useful for headlines and other creative treatments. The font was created by Pablo Caro, who is the same creator of last week’s font, Tiza. It supports many accent marks in addition to the base ASCII set of characters. Bola is licensed under the Open Font License.
Bola to me has a bit of a 60’s vibe to it, although I could kind of see it being kind of disco-y as well. If you’re not into the retro thing, you can go the route I took in the type sample and go for robots.
- Fedora Font Wishlist Entry: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NS_Bola_fonts
- Upstream Homepage: http://nuevostudio.com/projects/bola/
So, you want to package Bola?
Wonderful! You’re the bees’ knees! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:
Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:
And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:
Last week’s font
Last week’s font was Tiza by Pablo Caro. The Fedora wiki font entry has been upgraded from the wishlist state to the in-progress state by Edward (AKA tk009), who has kindly taken a stab at packaging it. It’s still pending package review, so if you can help review it, we’d greatly appreciate it. Nice job, Edward!
Fedora 12’s default wallpaper
We took your feedback into account, had another IRC sprint session and came up with something we’re all pretty happy with:
2048 x 1536, single-screen
2048 x 1536, dual-screen
Super-special thanks go to Rex Dieter, Martin Sourada, and Ian Weller for getting these packaged on time and helping out!
The artwork was inspired by the codename of Fedora 12, “Constantine,” who brought order from the chaos of the old Roman empire as he is credited with the foundation of the Byzantine Empire. We played around with visually representing order from chaos, first by representing order as ’tiles’ and chaos as ‘clouds’ interacting with one another, but in this last set of wallpaper sprints resulted in the order being represented by light and chaos as scattered translucent circles. In between these solutions, one visual representation that was considered was water droplets (chaos) vs a stream of water (order).
Yes, I can see your eyes are glazing over and your head is starting to droop to the side. All right then, let’s just say it just looks cool and is blue!
I really hope you enjoy this new wallpaper. I know it’s not animated like Fedora 8’s was – we need to plan that into the schedule better. The animated variants completely slipped my mind when we planned the F12 schedule with John Poelstra so we’ll have to remember that for F13. Psssst! If you are interested in hacking on some animated Fedora 12 wallpapers to go into F12 post-GA please talk to me or contact the design team list at design-team at lists dot fedoraproject dot org. It could be a great opportunity for you to get started with the Fedora Design team; we’ll help you learn how the animated wallpapers work (they’re really not tough at all) and help you get them packaged.
Speaking of F13, a couple things I would love to hear your suggestions on regarding the F13 theme artwork process:
- How can we (the Fedora Design Team) improve the artwork process so more folks are delighted with the work, but the artists themselves are not overloaded with unrealistic expectations and the impossible task of trying to please everyone? (I’m really not trying to be provocative here )
- What ideas do you have for the theme? Should we stick with the loose coupling to the release codename, or should we do something different?
For #1, I have a few random ideas. I really liked how we did live sprints in IRC to get the wallpapers done. The one thing that scares me about wallpapers, as someone who’s worked on them several times in the past, is that they quickly become a huge time suck and you may never end up satisfying folks no matter how much time you invest. We went through well over 82 mockups to arrive at the design we settled on. We could have easily taken up more time. I don’t think we have the resources to spend that much design team time.We couldplan some live sprint sessions in IRC, and ensure that at least 3-4 key design team members can be present at each session (maybe switching up the times so different design team members can participate). There could be a sprint session per wallpaper milestone, and we have to live with the result of that sprint after it. Honestly, we were arriving at designs we thought would probably be fine as a wallpaper in the 30’s, but kept going towards the 80’s because we really wanted something we didn’t feel like we rushed too much on. So I don’t think saying – ‘get it done in this time period and at the end, live with it’ means that we’ll live with crappy wallpapers. I think it just means, we all have other things we need to work on, and noodling on wallpapers will suck up every piece of free time you give it! Wallpapers are never really “done,” perhaps…
For #2, I just don’t know. I think the tie to the release codename is cool, and I’m not sure how we’d come up with a theme otherwise. We used to have a voting process, but that divided the team’s efforts – right when we should be working together, we ended up working against each other, and we had many people feeling like ‘losers’ in a competition. I would like to see us working more as a team, together. Maybe the Fedora Design team could do a brainstorming session for that. Take idea submissions from across the Fedora Community, and then the design team will meet and decide on which proposal we feel most excited about developing.
Anyway, I hope this post is met with delight and not groans…. but let us know about the groans (be productive though! Check out my little “How to Provide Helpful Critique” guide here) so we can adjust accordingly for F13. We’re always trying to improve the process – this is our first Fedora release we’ve had artwork drafts in the alpha! – so just let us know!
F12 Wallpaper Sprinting
UPDATE: The links to the full-size images were actually linking to smaller thumbnails; I updated these where I could so they point to the full 2048×1536 wallpapers.
I've been working with Jon McCann, Charlie Brej, Nicu Buculei, Jeremy Perry, María Leandro, and Ian Weller's help and critique the past few days on trying to come up with a slicker version of the F12 background for the final. 1 newly color-managed Thinkpad, 4 Gimp brushes, several CC-BY and CC-BY-SA textures from Flickr, 2 dozen SLR photos of shower water, and 62 mockups later… this is what we have so far. Please let me know what you think. We are working to get it packaged by this coming Tuesday so we can make it, and be awesome while we’re at it. If you have any suggestions or modifications you’d like to propose please reply here or on design-team at lists dot fedoraproject dot org.
The GIMP XCF source is available: 62.xcf.gz.
How to Provide Helpful Critique
Some folks understandably believe art and design are stuffs enshrouded in a mysterious haze of incense smoke without much logic or reason involved. I get it. I’ve been there too, and I think it’s easy to feel that way – discussions about art works sometimes get a bad reputation for being anywhere from fussy, to bizarre, to completely pointless.
You may find solace in the fact that there’s actually plenty of logical principles and elements and a vocabulary for them that can be use to discuss such works in a productive manner that doesn’t involve ‘invoking an embodiment of emotive symbolism’ or similar. I strongly recommend you explore some of this vocabulary, as not only will it help you more effectively communicate your critique but reading through a brief survey of basic design principles will probably even help you explain why you feel a particular way about an element of a work you’re critiquing. Some basic resources:
- Wikipedia: Design elements and principles
- Wikipedia: Composition
- Artwork Critique Form by Marvin Bartel
The Progression
Mosaico by María Leandro
Created with Inkscape.
Mosaic Glow by Máirín Duffy
Created with Gimp using a photo by Nicu Buculei.
Constantine Perspective Mosaico by María Leandro and Máirín Duffy
Created in Inkscape.
Mosaic Tiles by Máirín Duffy and María Leandro
Created in Inkscape and Gimp.
Mosaico Tilt by Máirín Duffy and María Leandro
Created in Inkscape and Gimp.
Mosaico Tiles Rain by Máirín Duffy
Created in Inkscape and Gimp.
Pastel Rain by Máirín Duffy
Created in Gimp
Splash 1 by Máirín Duffy
Created in In Gimp
Bubbly Splash by Máirín Duffy
Created in Gimp, using an animated Gimp brush created by Charlie Brej.
Splash 2 by Máirín Duffy
Created in Gimp.
Clean Drops by Máirín Duffy
Created in Gimp.
These are all Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Please feel free to use them!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
