Fedora 24 Alpha Wallpaper

First of all I want to thank everybody who voted for, read and liked my previous post about DevConf.cz 2016.  With your support I won the blog competition and got a bag of cool swag, including an xxxl sized t-shirt :p

That said, today I want to tell you and ask for feedback for Fedora 24 Alpha Release Wallpaper. Let me guide you for the process of wallpaper creation first. As you might know, before the final release, we have Alpha and Beta releases, for which we already have to package wallpapers. Between Alpha and Beta we collect feedback and make changes accordingly. You can take a look at previous versions wallpapers on their wiki pages:  f23_artwork, f22_artwork, etc, etc. There you can also take a look at banners (based on wallpapers) and supplemental wallpapers chosen by vote. By the way, everybody is welcome to submit supplemental wallpapers! If you have pics to share, read this article and contribute. The deadline is in April, so there’s still time.

Back to F24. We started the discussion maybe a bit late. I would’ve personally preferred more time to think and contemplate 😉 Also I felt that not as many people helped as I would’ve liked to. Basically, it was just 3 of us: me, gnokii and samo8.  And also I poked some people and asked them for feedback, which was generally positive, so yay! Ok, so we had our initial discussion on IRC in #fedora-design channel, where it was decided to go with the idea of space. If you’ve used Fedora for a while, you might have gotten the general impression like I did;) You can see on wiki, that “Release has no name”, so we had to improvise.

First I took a look at previous wallpapers and whatever CD sleeves I have lying around:

And naturally thought of space and stars =) My initial design was to take a pic of starry sky and put an overlay pattern over it, like so:

The triangles and hexagons are mine, and the pattern Sam created in Blender, I think. So we looked at that and thought a couple things: triangles were a bit weird, pattern a bit outdated and just having 24 up there too straightforward. Hmm..

Then we started thinking about how to hint at 24, but not write it directly. One of the ideas was: there are 24 hours in a day -> who came up with that -> hmm, I guess ancient Babylonians did -> ok, so let’s write it using Babylonian numerals. We also decided that creating a starry sky ourselves in Gimp would give us much more freedom and independence from the restraints of the photo and make the artwork completely original and new. As you might know Gimp has quite some plugins, like Starry sky, for example, or Stars in the sky.  I actually used both with a combination of renders, such as Clouds and Plasma to give the picture depth and color. I played with layer transparency, blurs and overlays to create various effects. So we did a couple of those and I even tried gnokii’s clock:

The clock was too much for the wallpaper, you can see it on the banner, though =) All in all, this still wasn’t it!

So we thought some more and I came up with an idea of a constellation. Here you can see a first draft with the vector stars I made in Inkscape and a much improved stars made by custom-made brushes in Gimp.

We thought a bit more and got rid of the stripe there, as it was reminiscent of precious releases and added instead a cloud in the background. Gnokii also insisted on idea of light traces, so I searched for images of star trails and was absolutely inspired to make them go in circle. After some play with colors and overlays and pasting Inkscape paths into Gimp we finally agreed on this image:

It has now been packaged and uploaded to Wiki, and we can collect feedback before the Beta release.

So please, if you have something constructive and helpful to say, please, comment.  I want to underline the word constructive here, too! and considerate! Thank you 🙂