The Past

My first ever libre software gettogether was GIMPCon in 2000. The location at the CCC gave it the proper underground vibe. That gathering later became what is now Libre Graphics Meeting when the GIMP and Scribus folks thought there’s some possible synergy to benefit from.

The future

It may sound like a little blasphemy for a GNOME person to say LGM is my favorite conference. I dig GUADEC for its mix of developer and user oriented talks and workshops, but at LGM this synergy seems to be working even better. There’s probably a trend towards attracting more designers than engineers, and I don’t know of a tech conference where there’s pretty much 50:50 gender mix (perhaps in Madrid there were more women than men even).

I want more conferences or gettogethers like this. Feedback from an animator struggling to finish a task is million times more valuable than online polls asking for a feature that exists in other tools. Small community projects struggle greatly with focus and motivation. These user<>developer sessions should not mean folding every single suggestion into Inkscape feature and SVG spec, but seeing tools used is the best we have for user testing.

There were some humorous mailing list like moments too (I hope video archives will be posted, the sessions were recorded). We had a nice example of miscommunication between Boudewijn and Mitch during the GIMP Q&A, but there is room to turn that “but printing spot colors is way more expensive than CMYK, stop ignoring your users” to “it’s the actual workflow, retaining control over individual channels during the process, that makes CMYK a subset of stop color process, the output/print process remains the same.” when talking off a mailing list. People sometimes need to talk face to face to turn those faster horses into cars. I have lost all faith in non-technical or controversial topics ever resolved on a mailing list.

Workshops

I also really enjoyed the “get your hands dirty” sessions such as David Revoy‘s Krita speedpaint workshop that are the carrot-at-the-end-of-the-stick for potential new designers giving libre graphic toolchain a go. Seeing amazing art created with our tools is an amazing motivator that allows to overcome some bumps on the way and actually find strength to find unfamiliar solutions or actually bite the lip and start the dialog with the developers (it’s harder than you think). I don’t think my painting skills will improve any time soon, but the workshop did expose a significant omission from the Wacom settings for non-screen tablet users. It felt the Krita developers are on a good course working closely with David to shape the tool and getting amazing promotion and an actual product in return, in a similar way the open movie projects dramatically improved the quality of Blender.

Type

A significant number of talks related to type. Ben Martin and Dave Crossland presented the collaboration features of the new Font Forge. This sounded really intriguing for me, because a lot of the design process is tedious and horrible and things like metrics are a torture that I found much more bearable when we did it with Patrys the other day.

Ana and Ricardo made me feel guilty about never finishing or publishing some of my fonts, because I felt they are too raw but then never gotten to finish them. They mentioned their new foundry and some utilities like the autospacer, giving you a template workflow rather than starting from the dangerous and feared blank slate.

If you ever needed some hand holding for designing your own type, Dave pointed out an extremely nice guide to me.

Getting Started

I gave a short talk on the work we did on Getting Started, but in an expected way was dragged away before I could show some guts of the project. As there’s been interest to see behind the scenes more, I’ll try to blow the dust off the design team youtube channel and do a screencast.

LGM Rocks

I really had a blast seeing everyone again, and came back with a list of things to do and also the energy to do so. Big thanks to the organizers and in particular the GIMP folks for their continuous support of the event.

UX Hackfest

Some of us came to A Coruña a few days early to work out some pending issues, like the File Picker or the Initial Setup. We later learned that it was also quite useful for the students to see the early stages of the design process.

GUADEC

As always, GUADEC was packed with interesting talks, but it’s fair to stress out how well it was all organized. Props to the galicians!

Yet again GUADEC managed to inspire me to create, rejuvinated my motivation contrasting with hearing “it can’t be done” all the time. I found Adam Dingle and Jim Nelson’s talk on sustanability and ways to crowdsource Free software projects quite inspiring and something we need to focus on when designing Software. It relates to the ecosystem diversity and the historical focus on shoving everything into the core moduleset and the resulting friction we mentioned in our talk (Hopefully the videos will be available soon).

The stuff I’m excited for? OSTree will hopefully decrease the iteration time and make me frown at jhbuild a little less. Smooth animation within applications that Owen Taylor presented is also something that I hope will be easy for developers to make use of. So back to work…

Allan has done a great job giving an overview of what we’ve been focusing on recently among the design team. This still leaves some room for me to give a peek on some of the details of what’s coming.

One of the decisions we made for GNOME 3 in terms of identity, was embracing Dave Crossland’s Cantarell and its open source pedigree and making the typeface our own. So far I have only been humbly shaping minor aspects of the typeface, but a long standing issue has been left long untouched, support for Cyrillic. Typeface design is certainly going outside my comfort zone. Luckily most of the glyphs can be dealt with by borrowing from their latin counterparts. The major part of the work involved (and will involve) some shape tweaks, metrics and hinting. Again, the bold weight poses bigger challenges at small sizes, which is our main focus.

Substituted cyrillic glyphs were all sorts of broken.

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As you can see, there’s still some tweaking left to do on the shapes and hints before rolling out 0.0.9, but those not intimidated by jhbuild, please give it a go so you can help me identify issues that aren’t apprent to me. Another set Cantarell needs to support is Greek, as it’s stylistictically required to keep close to the Latin set.

In this episode I’ll demo how to clip objects using another with Blender’s amazing modifiers. As a bonus you get to see the terrible working conditions I sometimes have to endure

You can grab the project file from the gnome design repository (you might need to clone the whole repo to get the textures).

As Allan already mentioned in one of his useful summaries, I’ve been pondering how how to improve the layout of the application picker in shell’s overview. While the mockup he showed does address the small click target problem, it still felt out of place with relation to the dash. I tried to apply different lipstick on it, but there was something inherently wrong with the layout and the overview lost its clean, “no boxes” feel.

The reason for the windows/applications toggle was easy extensibility. We thought of using shell to access people/contacts in the same way as we access applications. We thought to present documents in a better way without exposing the filesystem here as well. We thought the orthogonal arrangement ala Sony’s XMB would be fun on touch devices. Over time, I have come to the conclusion that extending the scope of shell might do more harm than good. I’ve never been a fan of all-in-one solutions ala iTunes.

Looking up people in a well designed contacts app might be an extra step to go through, but it won’t force us to kludge in some mode switching. We don’t yet have answers to finding & reminding, so I’m not stepping onto the thin ice just yet.

After some frobbing in Inkscape and Blender, I came out with a streamlined layout the overview, using a toggle button on the dash to expose ‘all apps’ for the less commonly used ones:

There are currently a couple of benefits to this approach — removing an item (favourite) from the dash is a matter of dropping it back to the ‘all apps’ pool without the need to show a temporary delete icon. We’re only removing it from the dash, not really uninstalling or deleting it. The ‘…’ button (“show me more…”) lives in the context of application launchers rather than arbitrarily floating in space.

You probably noticed the app picker here uses a pager instead of a scrolled view. Obviously this would require the apps to not be auto sorted and we would have to give the user the ability to sort the list. That way the pages would aid us better when finding a less frequently used app (“I know it’s down here among X and Y”).

How the transitions feel adds to the experience. I was aiming to have the launchers behave like a swarm when you toggle the button on and off. Sadly Blender trunk seems to misbehave with regard to the follow path constraint, so I have to punt that for now.

I regret we didn’t have time to go through this iteration before the 3.0 release, but I think the change is worth the pain.

Yesterday I posted a bit on how we plan to simplify the overview in Gnome Shell by dropping the tiled view. One thing that wasn’t so fancy about the new workspace panel — it still relied on the user to set up and manage the whole workspace environment .

It would be far more desirable to have Shell take care of most of that management stuff. Heavily inspired by zones from Moblin, here’s the latest proposal:

• There are no empty workspaces (apart from the initial state of not having any windows open whatsoever). If there are no longer any windows on a particular workspace, it gets merged with the adjacent one.
• To launch an application in a new workspace, you drop the launcher on the [X] target thumbnail. Similarly you can launch it onto existing workspace or move windows to a new/existing workspaces.
• In all other aspects it behaves the same as the previous iteration.

In future we might come up with a decent rule of what applications to run in a separate workspace by default (Gimp being one of those potential apps). We need to make sure the concept of workspaces is easily understandable in this case though, as suddenly they move from the realm of optional power-tool into a core functionality. As apps can be launched from outside of the shell overview, we would probably need to make the workspace switching animation much more pronounced. One such transition might zoom out the desktop a bit, slide to the right workspace in stack verticall and then zoom in again. Obviously all this in a fraction of a second.

Not so long after Florian cleaned up the overview-relayout branch to accommodate the visual tweaks initiated by Allan, here we are again to move the target a bit (engineers love me).

Initially shell exposed two views. A tiled view for an overview of your workspaces (something we can’t expect majority will want to manage). A linear view that presents application windows for easier switching (and dropping documents on). Exposing the mode switch to the user wasn’t good design and even if we presented the tiled view only when rearranging windows or selections of windows across workspaces, it felt like too much of an odd case.

Well luckily Jon came up with what I believe is an elegant solution that works around the limitations of the linear view. In addition it also helps to gradually introduce the workspace concept to curious users who would have otherwise not bothered.

Here’s a very crude motion mockup of how the sidebar behaves:

• The workspace sidebar is hidden by default, ignored by the majority of users. It would slide out on cursor proximity and or when a drag is initiated on a window or a launcher.
• This interface relies on animation – it would be hard to grasp if things just popped from one frame to another. Things need to scale and slide to aid the spatial relation between workspaces and windows.
• The IOS like rectangle navigation we had in the linear view only gave you an idea of the number of workspaces and the position. The thumbnails make it much easier to identify a workspace to switch to or drop a window/launcher to.
• The interface would work just as good horizontally, but it’s more common to scroll documents vertically and we already use the bottom of the screen for messages

Now while I think the workspace thumbnailing addresses the most useful part of the tiled view, we still rely on the user to do workspace “management”. So the next step is to make the Shell do the heavy lifting. Stay tuned.

First and foremost I want to thank J5 for organizing this year’s event. Lacking any sort of organizational talent (have hard time organizing my own day), I appreciate the effort one has to put into making an event like the Summit happen. In addition it has been great to see the sponsor support for an important event like this, Collabora in particular (for the best kind of sponsorship .

It’s always a bit amazing to walk the premises of MIT with a slightly unfair feeling of belonging there. The new media lab building is like time travelling to the future. Including the fear of robots attacking me in the hallways.

My private agenda has been quite successfully met. I have found a partner in crime for the execution of the visual theme for GNOME3 in Matthias Clasen, who has fiercely hacked at the most important bits of the widget theme to play well with the window decorations. And while it may sound like a bit of a setback to continue on “dead end street” of theme engines, we are actually going to see the work of Carlos Garnacho land and the final theme being executed solely CSS style, by designers rather than engineers. While Matthias has exposed some of the things I’d like to draw in gtkrc through the clearlooks engine, there is still things that aren’t yet achievable (such as drawing gradients for all the widget states rather than one). Also worth noting is that we’re standing on the shoulders of Benjamin Berg, Hylke Bons, Lapo Calamandrei and Thomas Wood here.

Forgive the lack of hinting on the font

You may have heard we’ve gotten the amazing Dave Crossland aboard and work on getting Cantarell ready to be used as a default screen font on GNOME3. It has been my pet screen font for quite a while despite some rough edges as it’s a typeface with the right pedigree (passionate designer understanding the collaborative free software culture rather than a commissioned work). I’m happy to have it be part of the GNOME3 identity.

System Settings work has also moved forward despite (or maybe due to) the lack of my contributions.

In the Gnome Shell land, Florian’s relayout branch is getting ready to land. Florian was quicker implementing the newest iterations than I was able to produce comps for them. It was fun to see an actual demo of something I planned to introduce.

The summit has successfully injected more enthusiasm for GNOME3. I hope the end result will show the amount of love that went into making it happen. We’re getting there!

• Some photos from the Summit

See the whole set

Took me a while to find some time to write up about this year’s GUADEC. I’ve done a bit of a pause and it’s been a bit different to what I recall. The first thing that stroke me is that I didn’t recognize a lot of the young crowd. Being one of the oldest in the conference is both great and a little depressing. But I choose to focus on the part that GNOME is a healthy project attracting young developers.

Design is in

I also sensed an increased interest in design. No more were we approached to provide some bling in the form of icons (hi Christian). We had a nice session with people from Epiphany project about page flow and tab organisation, “appification” of web pages and general role of Epiphany in GNOME. I made way too many promises, sadly.

The enthusiasm for involving design people gives me some hope the UX advocates project has a chance.

Shell Yes

Jon made a fairly convincing point that we lack a polished user experience, but also need to make a convincing experience for application developers. He also suggested a marketplace should be part of GNOME, and not let to fragment on the distro side, forming a viable application ecosystem. Learning from Android, Moblin/Meego or WebOS has been a thought that resonated with the audience.

Jon allowed me to demo some transitions from the new reskin we worked on recently. We may have freaked some shell developers a bit, but it really hasn’t been a dramatic redesign it may have appeared so at first. The greatest part was that Florian later showed us about 60% of the changes proposed implemented. Love when that happens. We had a good discussion about how to address some behaviour, mainly window to workspace and launcher related drag and drop. Expect some visualisations of that.

Iterating the indicator for running applications. Final design on the right.

The same “spotlight” effect can be used for active system indicators.

You can follow all the design work as it happens in the gnome-shell-design module.

Cluttersmith

As always Pippin blew us away with some nifty demos of a visual design / prototyping tool built on top of clutter, Cluttersmith. Sadly it will be some time before we can taste the sweetness of rapid prototyping.

WM theme

I even got stuff done! Based on the work we did during the UX hackfest in London, and the pixmap based prototype Hylke has worked on, I’ve actually found time to start implementing the window manager theme. It’s currently not using any pixmaps at all, but there are some obstacles still ahead of us.

A much larger and important piece of the theming puzzle will be the widget theme (these need to work together).

There is a ton I have missed that I regret, mainly the design pattern focused new HIG BOF, but I have enjoyed this year’s Guadec a lot. So that was another Guadec a mythical Lapo Calamandrei didn’t attend. Maybe the next one. Thanks to all and the GNOME Foundation in particular.

Today was my first day at Red Hat. I spent most of it behind the steering wheel though.

This isn’t the most radical job switch you can think of. Big corporation with strong focus on open source with red and grey dominating its visual identity. Most of the 3rd party rpms I download work just as well on Fedora 13 as they do on openSUSE 11.2 So why the switch?

The amount of upstream work I’ve been able to do has been in steady decline in the past few years and I am hoping to reverse that trend. As a graphics designer I’m hoping to give GNOME 3 the attention it deserves, so I’m planning to get back to hitting some afterburners maintaining the gnome-icon-theme and focus on visual design of gnome-shell.

Part of that is tying the loose ends of the symbolic style. Write some basic use guidelines and provide full naming spec coverage for gnome-icon-theme-symbolic.

Do the same for widget and WM themes what we did for icons — create a basic set of usable defaults that distributions can build on top of rather than reinvent the wheel. Asset reuse and building on top of other people’s work is what differs us from the proprietary world. Branding doesn’t have to throw that benefit away. Why run the whole marathon when you can just sprint the last mile?

I obviously do plan to join the Fedora design team to help shape the Fedora brand. But I am most interested in working on upstream GNOME projects, creating the building bricks both Fedora and other Linux distributions can benefit from.

I am a strong believer in competition. Free software has matured. We need projects/apps that have specific vision rather than try to do everything for everybody. It is necessary there are competing free software projects as there is no one right way to solve a particular problem. But there is a ton that can be shared. I personally like to focus on those bits that we can share and build cross-company, cross-distribution communities. I hope the geekos don’t feel like this is a farewell, even if I may now be seen wearing an eccentric hat.