Design/Kick-Off/CurrentWorkStatus

Introduction
This wiki page will summarize the work status of the Design Team and related major design topics up to the end of January 2011. About four months ago, we announced The Document Foundation among with LibreOffice Beta. Since then, many things have happened - some were more visible, others were less visible. To provide an overview - to get you on track and the Design Team working together as a real group - we want to shed some light on these activities.

They are listed below in more-or-less chronological order ...

The Document Foundation Website
In order to "go live", we also needed a website that considered the basic visual design language that had been created for LibreOffice Beta. Within the TDF team, we designed both the content and the structure of the page. Some time ago, I posted the initial design file - you may want to look at it.

Unfortunately, a few items were still missing - a lack of time and the use of basic HTML lead to some constraints. But, it worked like a charm! We got plenty of good feedback, and - being a static page - the infrastructure survived all the load peaks after the announcement.

Besides the TDF website, we also provided icons and artwork for the Wiki, and the Planet.

You can find all the elements of the initial page on the Design/Work Items page (Create and Publish Website Artwork).

LibreOffice Community Branding
You might guess that beginning with a visual design that had been started before the initial announcement of the Document Foundation might be considered strange for an open community like LibreOffice aims to be. I agree. At the beginning, there was a need to have something in place that just works, so that anybody will know: "Oh, that's LibreOffice!" Personally, I really think we achieved this very well ... especially due to the many iterations and improvements that went into the material.

Despite this, there is also a wish to have branding that grows out of our community ... we call that the "LibreOffice Community Branding". Some time ago, the team decided to keep the initial branding for a few releases, so that we create a stable environment for both the creators of material (marketing stuff, LibreOffice itself, ...) and our end-users.

The advantage of this approach is that it will leave us with sufficient time to work on the Community Branding. And this is required, because the branding derives from the strategic goals by the community, the intended user base of LibreOffice, and the creative power of the Design Team members. Of course! Some people even started to ideate the visual identity briefing which will be a great starting point ... once the more urgent topics are finished.

You can find more information on the Community Branding topic on the Design/Work Items (Create / Refine Branding Roadmap), and some ideas on the pages mentioned below.

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
Well, even with an "initial branding" you can't hinder creativity :-) So there have been numerous proposals during the last months being documented on the following pages:


 * Marketing/Branding/Ideas
 * Marketing/Branding/Avatar Proposals
 * Marketing/Branding/Banner Proposals

LibreOffice Icons
The "topic" application icons and the document icons caused a lot of worries in the last months. In one of the previous versions OpenOffice.org, the colored icons had been replaced by highly artistic but - at the same time - equally looking ones that aimed to promote the document format ODF. Many people considered this a major usability problem, since the icons itself were hard to distinguish from each other. Thus, for the LibreOffice Beta release, we decided to roll back the icons and use the "Galaxy" style originally created for OpenOffice.org. This was a solution, but only a temporary one - the Galaxy icons contain the Sun S-curve branding and the characteristic seagulls which interferes with our aim to provide a consistent visual experience with LibreOffice.

Thus, we started (although a bit late), to work on a set of application and document icons. The "we" is important in this case - this was the very first collaborative visual design approach that we know about since a long time. Thus, I'm proud that we made the decisions together, and provided feedback or graphics that lead to iterative improvements. I have been told that people in the French community followed the progress closely, and Drew pointed out that each new icon improvement was "measurable" on Twitter. That was possible, because we provided information and progress on a dedicated wiki page, in blog postings, and some photo sharing websites.

To make you understand why this has been a major achievement - although we restricted ourselves to only provide the most essential ones, we talk about over 130 icons that are hand optimized (computer display pixel grid, visual disabilities compensation). However, to ensure high quality by testing, and meeting the release date, the icons have not been included into LibreOffice 3.3 - but this will change for the upcoming 3.3.1 minor release.

Something I still consider unique is, that Paulo - a new guy to this community - stepped in and made up the missing 256px icons (can also be used for marketing material) and polished many of the 128px icons. It was a great pleasure to see this enormous team spirit! Finally, have a look at the icons below ...



More information can be found on the Design/LibreOffice Initial Icons wiki page.

LibreOffice Development Support
In general, there haven't been that much activities between the LibreOffice Design Team and the Development - although there had been numerous requests to join. But first we had to focus on the Website, the Branding, and the Icons - not to forget our Kick-Off :-) Consequently, this is something we really have to change.

The only exception: Cedric and Björn have started to rework the fields dialogue in LibO Writer as there has been a request from development (Cedric) to add some new features. While thinking about how to integrate them, we found some better ways to actually handle the 'add a field'-task in general. Once there are results I will add a link here.

A smaller request came from Kohei (and is still open), to work on the small document icons which shows the "document changed" in the status bar. Similar to such small but important improvements, we've been asked several times to provide so called EasyHacks for the development - tasks that help developers to get comfortable with the code. Still something to do.

But, of course there have been (sometimes quite fruitful) discussions on the development lists - people started to refer to User Experience related topics by adding "[UX]" to the subject. You may want to scan some of those posts via the mailing list search for "UX". That also means, that some of of us "linger around" on the developer mailing list - to pick and to forward some topics. So our proposal is to subscribe there as well (see Get Involved, Development). Same for the developers, only some are subscribed to our list - at least we asked a few weeks ago.

Next Steps
This has been a rough overview of what has happened until now. Still interested, then stay tuned for the next steps to finalize our Design Team Kick-Off! And if you have questions or proposals how to improve this page, then please send them to the Design Team mailing list (see Design Team Communication).

Thanks!