Re: [libreoffice-design] Where does the design-team go?

Hi Klaus,

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 8:58 AM, klaus-jürgen weghorn ol <
ol@sophia-louise.de> wrote:

> Hi all,
> seems to be a very aggressive title?
> My personal impressions are that the design team is loosing the sight for
> graphical elements, and only works on user experience.
> Let me tell what happened the last weeks:
> 1. Taking *all* VI from whiteboard list to playground list.

Playgrounds were an experiment that didn't pan out.
The idea was to have continuous iteration on the visual design of things,
as, unlike interaction design, visual design proposals are easy and quick
to implement.


> 2. Talking about, that it isn't the design team's job for working on
> T-Shirts or other marketing material

We are doing the FOSDEM T-shirts (Astron should put up a whiteboard soon),
but were wondering whether it's not a better fit for the marketing team.


> 3. Taking off all Playground lists. Where is the discussion to do this? So
> there is no way to find any work for visual identity.

The discussion is at
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Meetings/2012-11-10.
It boils down to none of the playgrounds being maintained or active, and if
people want to collaborate, we don't want them to waste time on projects
that aren't very relevant anymore.
We'll do whiteboards instead of playgrounds now.

4. There were no dialogs about buttons, banners, conference material etc.
> I know that some of you aren't work on VI but there is a huge call for
> banners, web buttons etc. Especially for 4.0. And that isn't the marketing
> team's job.
> It seems that I'm the only one working for this and this isn't good
> because I haven't the skills to do such things for 4.0.

There should be a 4.0 rebranding whiteboard up soon.

> When we do a review we should do a view too:
> I have a simple problem with the whole design working process. The focus
> of all who worked here for the last year was only on [UX]. We have no [VI]
> in work. We don't give the marketing what they urgently need [2]. We as
> Design team didn't work on any stuff for the next Conference.

I wouldn't say we've done no VI work, because we've done icons, templates,
the 3.6 rebranding, and a new Windows look.

It's true that many of the volunteers (me included) are more focused on the
UX work, but you can't blame them for working on what they prefer.

A while ago, I sent out an e-mail about project caretakers.
Would you like to create a few VI whiteboards and become a caretaker?
Which whiteboards so you think we need?

> Look and compare the Whiteboards and the Playgrounds to get a feeling
> about it. Marketing material is in Playground, no working point in
> Whiteboard.

(See reasoning for playgrounds above.)

> Maybe my words are a bit hard. I thought about all of it the last weeks.
> Then two questions appear to me and I gave them a name:
>
> 1 Nik as a great designer for the stuff here who was away for a longer
> time comes along and asks this question:
> Nik's question: "What stuff can I do for you now to get a really good
> movement in your design? Only one because I have no time to work on many
> things." What would we say?


> 2 Bernhard had the experience to get the stuff in a well-structured order,
> so the people can find and work with it easily.
> Bernhard's question: "Where can I find the material to work on next?"
> Let's have a look: "Wiki - Design - ? Aaah Whiteboard, but there is only UX
> and no graphical design. So they need no graphical design?"
>
> Let's do our next work with these two questions.
>
> The marketing team starts a discussion about their strategy [3] and of
> course there are some critics even the design team is concerned [4]. Do we
> get them? Do we work on it? If we don't do this the others made it for
> themselves without us.
>
> And we should do this too: Defining a strategy for design [VI] and [UX].

Not sure what exactly you mean by that -- could you elaborate?

> ------ maybe an own discussion but part of strategy
> I don't think that the voting about the new design in 3.6 happened in a
> really good way no matter what happened with the announcement.
> We should not vote by Google+ or even by IRC. Especially not for the
> design which concerns to our presentation. Google+ can show us some
> direction, and IRC is not my/our tool for community and communication (I
> e.g. am not able to join these IRCs). There was no official discussion
> about the proposals here on the ml (or I missed it). And lack of time isn't
> an excuse for it.

Alright, we'll make sure we're more open this time.

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