Artwork for FOSDEM

Someone recently linked to the artwork in the USENIX LISA event, I
wanted to say something slightly off-topic about it.

I'm not the world's best graphic designer, but I learned a few things
when I worked in a publishing company and have some graphic designer
friends, and though the work done is a great starting point I have a
few tips for improvements.

Obivously there's a lot of "personal preference" in this, but I'll
share my comments so it's hopefully informative along with an updated
design. If people agree that's cool, if not that's cool too.

- We should use the same font as the KDE websites/other artwork. A
font is just as important to an identity as the logo. You can
recognise several brands (i.e CocaCola) just from the font alone. I
/think/ we use bold Droid Sans, ideally I'd like to check.

- Never stretch a font, it becomes a completely different font if you
do. If you stretch a font it's saying you know better than the font
artist.

- Equally never stretch an image without keeping the aspect ratio. It
immediately looks wrong.

- Font shadows should generally go the same direction. You
subconciously automatically when seeing shadow's guesses illumination
direction - if it's inconsistent you'll feel something is wrong, even
if you can't identify what, like a bad 3D movie.

Tip: Don't do drop shadows yourself with copying and pasting use in
built SVG drop shadows with a filter, it's easier and everything is
smoother and blurred out correctly. :-)

- Objects should never touch the edge of a page, and margins should be
symetrical / equally distributed. Otherwise things looked "cramped".
So the KDE logo and writing "KDE" is fine, but the distance between
"Working Together" and the left edge should be the same as "Join the
Game" and the right edge.

Original: http://runeman.org/kde/lisa11/boothsign.png

Updated: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/01/14/KDE_Community_thumb.png

Also we should maybe use the default KDE 4.8 wallpaper, as it will be
out before Fosdem.

New Wallpaper: http://wstaw.org/m/2012/01/15/KDE_Community_thumb_new.png

SVGs available on request, and I could update other stuff if people wanted.

David Edmundson

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