In hopes of encouraging people, I want to speak up on this. *** The following is my personal opinion, not necessarily the opinion of my employer. ***
I can say with a great deal of confidence that Mark did not want to use the same look as dapper. This is not because I have some special communication channel with Mark, but because of the encouragement and effort he invested over the last few months. When I was hired by Canonical in July, just after the Dapper launch, I talked to both Jane and Mark. Because I am a member of the art team and because working with artists is something I like, I spoke with both of them about it. >From both people, the word was that, prior to Dapper, the art team was just a bunch of people who happened to like art or the aesthetics of Ubuntu and had a desire to help out. However, as fun as that is, that type of group cannot have a serious impact on the final outcome of Ubuntu. Instead, it was the desire of both Jane and Mark, and presumably others who I didn't talk to, that the art-team would morph into a powerful force of not only interested artists, but driven and motivated contributors who could adopt the development cycle and techniques of the rest of the Ubuntu developers to create polished and complete themes for future releases. You can talk to Ken and Troy S as well as Frank about this and I think they will agree. Back in July, the goal was that the process would be refined and perfected. The hope was that it could get done soon enough for a contribution to Edgy, but there was no promise. I spent a few days in the London office working with Mark and not once while I was there did I see him eat babies or kill kittens. He is driven and intense but he doesn't take joy in watching others suffer. Realize that Mark's reputation and image are reflected in Ubuntu. Like you, he does not want to settle for "good enough" because that doesn't characterize him. He wants excellence and he feels that it is worth waiting for. Both Jane and Mark compared the art team to the doc team. Keep in mind that I'm still talking about July, not present. They said when the doc team started it wasn't very effective. Then, something happened, and the team got organized and got together. They started adopting the processes that made other Ubuntu developers successful and now they are the model for other teams to follow. Mark mentioned in a recent e-mail to this list that he hopes it will happen here as well. I can understand everyone's disappointment, but remember, we're still at step 1; the goal here is not to produce wicked art, the goal here is to develop a wicked team. To me, it looks like we're making tremendous progress. -- Matthew Nuzum newz2000 on freenode -- ubuntu-art mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
