SFD organization by BJGUG in Beijing

It’s been one month past while the SFD event hold in Beijing. I was recommended by BJGUG to have a speech to introduce GNOME and OPW in this event at Beijing Jiaotong University. Although most of the audience are boys, but it did not blocked me to spread OPW and share my owner exciting experience. I mostly encourage everyone to participate in community activities, being a member as a contributer of GNOME and other freedom software.

Here is the presentation I prepared in this event:
Presentation-Introduce_GNOME_and_OPW.pdf

My internship is reaching an end soon but not my use and contribution to GNOME

My internship is reaching an end soon but not my use and contribution to GNOME. Most of my work went to the GNOME visual identity design. I really hope they can be used in the future, and through more uses and continuous improvement it may be mature.

I uploaded the GNOME Visual Identity svg source here, it include 46 pages / layers in one file.

And here is the presentation templates with 1024*768px can be directly used.

Since I still do not export pdf format correctly because I made a lot of mask set in the graphic. My mentor Andreas suggested: “Masks are a bit of a issue with pdf’s in general, and if you use them for masking things out, I would suggest using path > difference on the shapes instead.” But I didn’t figure out it yet.

I really have enjoyed this internship with GNOME community, and thanks to all of your support and comments, hope we can stay in touch.

A pure and beautiful Gannan grassland

I spent a few nice days on the northwest Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China- a pure and beautiful Gannan grassland.

In there, the cute little yak are anxiously looking for his mother because of the too big meadow; the stream flowing is cold enough to let the local Tibetans to cool beer; the long sweep of green hills always let people full in daydreams; the handsome horses walks slowly in tiny steps.

Also, in field the wheat with golden yellow in all way; terraced fields are like colorful patches of the earth; and the small flowers do spot the green land…

(We meant to go to Berlin to attend Desktop Summit with a short holiday in Europe, but our visa was unexpectedly refused in the last minute, so we turned to the Gannan grassland instead.

GNOME Foundation webpage design

I was asked to integrate The GNOME Foundation website into gnome.org, so I drafted some mockup based on gnome.org layout, and I also tried to made the mockup in my WordPress testbed.

here is a mockup ( I like the head banner better than others.)
         (after these comments below, I drafted this new banner with bubbles)

BTW: I have a problem with my WordPress testbed now. As you can see I leaved the  page right side  in blank in my testbed, because I don’t know how to insert the two boxes in my testbed page, which I want to do is exactly same as in the front page of gnome.org.

I wonder if some one can help me with this issue? Thanks!

GNOME Visual Identity manual

Hi everybody,

Here is the first version of GNOME Visual Identity manual, all of them are 44 pages, there are include:

01- INTRODUCING GNOME

02- LOGO

03- COLORS

04- TYPEFACES

05- ICONS

06- APPLICATIONS

Please feel free to make comments!

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Iconic design applied in a table cloth and brochure

There were some excited things happened to me, I must write it in blog to share with you all.

One thing is my iconic design for GNOME VI somehow becoming used! when Emily asking me to design a tab page for COSCUP, it’s the first chance I put the icons be used. Although I was only retouched a poster based on an original (because time is so short, and I real like the original design), but when I put a lager cloud behind the little robot, I felling as happy as the little robot:) here you can find the editable svg sources.

Later I applying icons to a table cloth, which will be used in the Desktop Summit.

I have to say my mentor Andreas Nilsson gives me the important help which he always encourage me when I showing him my design. “I really like these. I love the footer!” some times he will say:)

I have to soon later follow up a blog post with more complete and integrate description of the visual identity  for feedback and comment.

Advocating OPW in Mozilla China’s office

I was invited to talk about OPW and my OPW experience in a communitty memeber gather-together event co-organized by Beijing GNOME user group and Mozillla China.

* The location: Mozilla China office lies in the heart of Beijing. Besides office building they have a special room just for activities, with lovely Firefox mascot and Firefox carpet.
* Our hostess is a girl, and besides her, one guest, one speaker (me). Everyone else are boys. I joke with them about lack of female in the group.
* All other talkes are highly technical.
* I spoke of having done some VI work, people then gets excited. They started to talk about VI plug-ins until they realize it’s about visual identity:)

My VI design progress

GNOME 3 install-fest took place in Beijing, too

The install-fest event in Beijing was held yesterday (15 Jun) at Novell office, organized by Emily Chen (GNOME board member) and fellow bjgug (Beijing GNOME user group) members. Li Bin (developer in Novell, GNOME development of contributor, he will attend the summit in Berlin) introduce by running GNOME3 based on OpenSuse 11.4 for new features and operation.

We look forward to GNOME3 has been a long time, and yet GNOME3 show us many fashion features, including its Activities, Search, Workspaces, Switching, Maximizing and tiling, Dash. (I have no technology knowledge, so I don’t know this part of new features:)

I list the question who asked during the introduction and also more concerned about:

Shut-down button. When the speaker shows the magic the shut-down button will appear once you press the Alt key, everyone laughed, including both supportive and disagreeable audiences:)

Utilization of space on the desktop. The left and top space always made some people want to utilize it especially in the smaller screen.

Finally, thank Novell provided the venue, and thank all of your participation and support, there are includ some members in Novell, Debian, Ubuntu.

Start working on web stuff too

Hey all

Thanks for everybody supporting and commenting my work.

At the outset I was offered to work on visual identity OR gnome web work. I used to mostly work with jEdit (css/html) and gimp. I opted for doing visual identity for the excitement of potential achievement, and the special opportunity of learning and using Inkscape.

After having worked with VI for two week or so, I decide it’s best for me to battle two fronts at the same time: to start working on web stuff too. For inspiration do not come from concentrating but from diffusing one’s mind, and alteration of topic from day to day offered me the diffuseness I need. I am reading to see where I can be of aid to gnome website project.

Two things that come to mind is migrating Foundation web [1] and Friends of GNOME [2] to the WordPress version of the site.

Foundation – This one is pretty much about moving content and fixing the navigation and it’s a good task for getting started with WordPress and getting to know the template system, get a feel for the style etc. (a special footer graphics would be cool) I would advice to start with this one.

Friends – Needs slightly more work. I did some work late last year [3] with some jquery magic, but never finished it. It might need a specific WordPress template and some additional hacks to get working, but nothing too hard.

The challenge on gnome web work are two quite different ones, that I didn’t yet meet in my last foss contribution (news rss ticker website).

First, there is a web planning/interactiveness design challenge that exists on every web project. To make a good website is to first understand the audience. I am limited to only understand a segment of gnome audiences. I don’t program and don’t know what programmers look for on gnome website, nor work with other IT companies to establish upper-lower stream relationship, which means I don’t know what vendors look for from gnome website. Luckily the burden of this aspect seems to be on the shoulder of my mentors, but I should keep aware of the audiences during my work.

Second there is a technical challenge. I used to be confident about my basic knowledge of HTML/CSS, but I am a slow learner on getting used to a CMS. It took me one year or two to get used to theme for Drupal! I start to worry I may need a lot time to get used to wordpress. Most programmers must think me a slow learner. I do get used to technical things very slowly. I hope learning CMS is like learning a foreign language: as soon as you manage the 3rd language, the 4th, 5th languages are much easier.

BTW, here is a few VI mock-up and icons I retouched: