Making of SUSE Studio’s Failwhale
One of the best features of SUSE Studio is the ability to boot your appliance remotely on our servers without downloading it first. It’s cool to test and improve the appliance as you can actually bring the changes done interactively back to the appliance project.
Of course there are times when everybody wants to do that at the very same time, so we have a queue system to accommodate the situation with limited resources. As this is not exactly a pleasant thing for the user we thought to make it less annoying by providing a nice graphic to look at while waiting. The first idea was to have a couple of Disters (our robot mascot) standing a line.
But it looks a bit depressing, doesn’t it? Instead of cheering up the user waiting, the image of a long line actually strengthens the negativity of the situation. So back to the drawing board. How about focusing on the fact that we have our hands full rather than the user waiting.
As the sketch worked well and got approved, I went ahead with tracing it. The beginnings are always hard as the graphic doesn’t seem to work until the very last moment. But in the end we’ve gotten ourselves a brand new failwhale:
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm
I so wish I could draw characters like that dude… You never fail to impress me.
Also, approve me on facebook already
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Just awesome !
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Very nice. I’d love to see a screencast of you tracing in Inkscape. Sketching with pencil and paper seems so normal but trying to “sketch” on inkscape just feels weird. Should I use a path? object? Do I occlude or just draw the shapes.
It’d be cool to see how you go about this…
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Yeah, that’s a really cool process and I second Matt’s comment in so much as this would make a great screencast as the approach lends itself to creating SVG FOSS icons as well as cool graphics!
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Very nice but I prefer the sketch!
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Thanks folks. As for the screencast, it would have to be more of a time-lapse as the trace took me well over 8 hours. More like 10. I know many folks use a wacom and more classical approach, but for me it’s essentially lots of bezier paths as I’m unable to be both precise and create natural looking curves at the same time.
Ages ago, when I used Adobe Illustrator 9, they had a magic pencil tool or somesuch where you would stroke a path to finetune its shape. I’d perhaps be able to use that.
November 4th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
I love these Dister illustrations. Brilliant work. My kids want to know when the Dister cartoon will be coming out. They are patiently waiting but you know how kids are.
November 7th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
[...] a few posts and articles about SUSE Studio have appeared, including some with artwork fun and instructional content. From Maximum PC: Now that planning is out of the way, we can get to the [...]