I am really happy with all the positive energy of the current LGM participation. I remember to read all mails by Femke and co, and thought "Wow, the next LGM will be great!" I am afraid however that the discussion of the new website is mixing "How do you like this website?" with "Should we profile ourself with a consistent style (logo, website, color palette, ...) across the years?".
Right now it looks like that there is no fixed style for the LGM. (There is of course always the one from previous year. Although it might have the preference of many, there will be always others to disagree with it.) When there is a call for organizing the next LGM, using a certain style is not part of the task as far as I know. By consequence the style gets reinvented every year, which is not surprising if you give freedom to creative minds. In my humble opinion this means: - We should respect the autonomy of the current organisation and give them the final say in the current design. Feedback is welcome here, but nobody can impose its will the organisation. - The current design can't be imposed for future editions of the LGM, as this would need a broader consensus outside the organisation of the current LGM alone. So basically we've discovered a bug here "LGM style gets reinvented every year". Do we mark this bug as valid? If yes, what is the priority of this bug? The people who gives this bug high priority and want to donate time to it, should maybe organize a session in the LGM about 'consistency'. Maybe do a presentation and some workshops as a start. I am afraid that designing a logo and website for such a heterogeneous organisation as LGM will be nearly impossible and might even take more than a year to reach consensus. For me personally this bug has relatively low priority in comparison to other 'bugs'. To be honest I think anyway for the LGM Brussels it is too late to fix this bug. Let's not slow down the development of this organisation and give them the same freedom as the previous editions took in the end. I am sure most people don't resign working for a non profit organisation or a company because they don't like the logo. If I as a visual artist should feel 100% about every title of an exhibition I participate in, I could better stop. It doesn't really matter but in case you want my opinion on the design... Although it would not be my personal preference, as a visual artist I feel the design has objectively a strong quality. It is well done and will for sure appeal to a large group of graphic designers and artists, maybe less to developers and end users. The design has an explicit style and for example mixing the splash into this design would be failure. Logo design is all about communication, so about knowing your target audience. So my only critic on this logo could be that it seems not to target the full potential audience of free graphic software, as shown by reactions on this list. However I still think the design is good and I don't want to interfere with it. Fiddling with this design to reach a consensus risks to make it worse. So I agree completely with the 'package deal' statement of Louis. Organizing a LGM is a huge package and a lot of work. I am sure Louis and previous organizers know this more than anyone else. Concerning the LGM organisation I worry more about other issues: - such as attracting more sponsors so we can let more people participate - next to presentations of developers, presentations of experienced end users which describe their workflow struggle between free graphics applications. Maybe a call for proposals could be launched on all the website of free graphics software simultaneously? - or maybe organize a survey amongst end users about their workflow and present the result of that - ask end users to submit video screencasts of their workflow ... - ... Concerning LGM as the glue between graphics projects my concerns would be: - interoperability of file formats - if every application could have an (optional) keymap which is unified for common tasks - use the same words (and if possible menu structure) for common tasks - ... Right now free software projects start spending more attention to usability. It would be great if LGM could be a driver behind usability between applications. Maybe not all applications want to participate, but for sure some do. And hey Yuval, I hope you participate again at LGM Brussels! LGM needs people like you. Although I agree with you that Peters reply was offensive, it is no reason not to participate. _______________________________________________ CREATE mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create
