The Fedora Design Team Bi-weekly Bounty is a bi-weekly blog post where we’ll outline a quick-and-easy design project that needs doing for the Fedora Community, outlining all the tools, files, and other resources you’ll need to complete the project. If you’re a designer and are interested in getting involved in the free and open source community, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet!
Fedora 13 Feature Profiles
As you might have read about in Mel Chua’s blog post about Fedora 13 marketing deliverables last night, the Fedora marketing team is putting together a Fedora 13 press kit that will be provided to members of the press at the 2010 Red Hat Summit event in Boston, Massachusetts later this month.
An important part of that press kit is the six-page Fedora 13 Feature Profiles document. The feature profiles are a series of excerpts of interviews Mel Chua, Paul Frields, Robyn Bergeron, Hannah Kowen, and Nelson Marques did with developers Stephen Gallagher, Dan Williams, Josef Bacik, Ben Skeggs, Tim Waugh, Richard Hughes, Mike McGrath, and David Malcolm to provide information and background about some of the new features in Fedora. Mel put together an initial draft of this document for print (OpenOffice ODT source) using OpenOffice.org.
Your Mission
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to polish up the design and layout of the Fedora 13 Feature Profiles print document.
Polishing Tips
I put together a version of the Feature Profiles document that has some critique & suggestions in the margin with my Hello Kitty pink pen of doom. You might want to refer to those tips in figuring out how to improve the layout:
Helpful Files
- ODT Source File for the document (OpenOffice.org file / by Mel Chua)
- PDF with layout critique & suggestions
- SVG source for the banner at the top of the page (Inkscape file / by María ‘Tatica’ Leandro)
- Source photo for the banner (by Nohemi Rojas)
Helpful Tools
- OpenOffice.org – You may install it on Fedora using ‘yum install openoffice.org-writer’ or by searching for it in PackageKit. If you are not using Fedora, you can download it here. You’ll need OpenOffice.org to work with the ODT source file.
- Inkscape – You may install it on Fedora using ‘yum install inkscape’ or by searching for it in PackageKit. If you are not using Fedora, you can download it here.
- The MgOpen Modata fonts – the document uses the MgOpen Modata fonts. These are free & open source fonts. If you have Fedora you can install them by using ‘yum install mgopen-modata-fonts’ or by searching in PackageKit. If you don’t have Fedora you can download the fonts from their website. On Fedora, you install them by making a directory called “.fonts” in your home folder and moving the font files into that folder.
Helpful Resources
- Fedora 13 Press Kit wiki page
- Full Fedora 13 Feature Profile Interviews
- OpenOffice.org Documentation: Using columns to define the page layout
- OpenOffice.org Forums: Two column article layout with Title spanning the columns
- The Fedora Design Team: please drop by #fedora-design on irc.freenode.net for any assistance! (Join our chat on the web here. Or join and drop an email to our mailing list.
What’s in it for you?
Okay, okay, we get it. You’re a designer or OpenOffice.org whiz, and you’ve got things to do – why would you bother helping out with this? Let’s do a quick run-down of what’s in it for you:
- If you don’t already have it, you’ll get membership into the Fedora Design Team, which includes Fedora voting privileges and hosting space for Fedora-related projects.
- For your personal portfolio you’ll have a layout that will be used as a part of a real press kit distributed at the 2010 Red Hat Summit professional event in Boston, Massachusetts at the end of this month.
- You’ll build skills in using Inkscape and OpenOffice.org – these are excellent free & open source tools that are worth learning because you can use them for just about any design project in the future and they are free forever. You’ll also build skills in addressing general layout challenges!
- If you send me your snail mail address, I will send you a thank you card, a full-color copy of your design, and some Fedora swag in thanks for your help!
- You’ll gain experience in contributing to a free/open source project.
- You’ll learn more about Fedora 13′s feature during the process of laying the document out – some of those features may prove interesting if not useful to you.
- Bragging rights as a free/open source project design ninja & more importantly the first Fedora Design Team Bi-weekly Bounty designer!
You’re totally pumped, right? Awesome. So where to start?
Ninja by Hector Gomez from openclipart.org – Public Domain.
The Rules
- You’ll need a Fedora account to submit your work. Don’t worry, it’s not hard to get, you can sign up for it here, quickly and painlessly: Create a Fedora account. Once you’ve created your account, log in to sign the contributor license agreement (this gives us permission to use your work!)
- If you are interested in taking this bounty on please make a comment to this blog post below. The first person to claim it in the comments will have exactly 48 hours to give it a shot, at the end of which the bounty will be opened up for someone else (you can try to re-claim it if you want.) I will announce all status changes in the comments.
- You must provide source files for your work. This is so we can make any necessary edits or provide translations for the document, create a reusable template out of your awesome deign, or just generally learn from how your design works. If you’re working with OpenOffice.org, this means we need the ODT file, and any SVGs or other graphics you may be incorporating into it.
- When you’re ready to submit your work, submit it on the press kit wiki page. If you need help email me (duffy at fedoraproject dot org) or pop into IRC!
Good luck!
