Fedora LiveUSB Creator artwork

As my first job as Red Hat design intern I received from Mo a task to create some icons for Fedora LiveUSB Creator. The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives. A Live USB system stored on flash memory, sometimes called a stick, lets you boot any USB-bootable computer into a Fedora operating system environment without writing to that computer’s hard disk.

As it is a Fedora specific app, the marks were supposed to look “Fedora”, but be very simple and clean. Here’s a list of ideas I was provided to start with:

paint brush for design suite (name: design-suite)

robot for robotics suite (name: robotics-suite)

gamepad for games (name: games)

guitar for jam (name: jam)

test tube / beaker / earl meyer flask for scientific (name: scientific)

lock for security (name: security-lab)

Mo was very kind and not only provided me with useful pointers, but also some Fedora imagery to refer to:

So I started with creating a bunch of sketches:

The most fun I had, of course, with the robot! I thought about those thoroughly and asked some people what they thought about my sketches, and by popular decision chose some of them to be vectorized in Inkscape. So here is my first draft of icons:

It was time to consult with the ticket owner and a much more experienced Fedora contributor about the choice of colors and final images. So I contacted gnokii. He helped me choose the background and finalized icon choice. We replaced the plain background with the background from .next logo for the workstation.

Here’s what we came up with:

And finally it was time for upstream desktop icons to correlate with those. The desktops list:

KDE
Xfce
LXDE
MATE-Compiz
Cinnamon
Sugar on a Stick

Some of them have their own logos, but the last two really don’t, so Mo and I had to get a little creative 🙂 I drew a cinnamon flower and a stick for Cinnamon, and for Sugar on a Stick we just wrote the abbreviation SoaS.

Cinnamon icon has already come in very handy here.

Finally, take a look at them altogether: