Here's a rather rough start of a design that I put together... any thoughts about what elements are worth continuing with vs which ones are kind of "ehh" ?

Hey @maryshak the rendering here is beautiful but I have some concerns about the symbolism and composition.

Symbolically it might not be the best perspective anyway because you're looking up from the bottom of the sea... the focus is looking up from below... it positions the viewer in a low position. You could probably override the perspective being the main focus by playing around abit more, highlighting the details on the bottom so it's not so black / dark, playing with the arrangement of the fish so they draw more of the attention, not using pure bright white / a stark contrast between the surface and the bottom as to not draw attention. The visual hierarchy i'm seeing here in order is:

• white brightness of the surface
• fish
• darkness of bottom

I think symbolically / meaning-wise, you'd want to change up the emphasis so composition / arrangement of the fish was at the top of the hierarchy, if that makes sense?

The composition overall and high level visual I'm worried is too close to Fedora 9's wallpaper: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wallpapers#Fedora_9

I pinned a few underwater scenes that were at different angles / perspectives as suggestions to get around people linking this to Fedora 9. I think again, you can get over this / around this by emphasizing the fish a lot more, doing something interesting with them and working with the scene as a backdrop.

Hey @duffy , I tried a new iteration using a similar (but less dark) version of the last one but tried your idea of jellyfish and made them more prominent on the screen than the fish were. Do you think that this would be a better route to continue down?
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@maryshak1996 yes! No trace of Fedora 9 there :-) i would play with the balance / hues of the palette, maybe tone the contrast down a couple steps - the swirl here is really pleaaing to the eye tho (did you use golden mean?) and the bg texture is nice! Great work!!!

@duffy thanks for the feedback! I'll mess with the contrast a bit, but I'm glad to hear that I'm going in the right direction here. I didn't particualry have the golden ratio in mind, but now that you mention it, it definitely has hints of that that give an added nod to the "STEM" focus of these wallpapers! More updates on these jellies to come :)

I just brought down the contrast between the jellies and the background a bit and exported in all of the required sizes so that we could take a look at the placement of the jellyfish at each size (tweaked a few, where the size had a wider orientation)
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I do not see the wallpapers packed in the latest nightly build. Is there any place where I can find it ?

Ah, thanks @jkurik for pointing to this. (I was looking for mailing list conversation.) This is also better than the Wiki for mockups and ideas. :)

I do have two concerns from the mailing list:

First, I feel like the jellyfish, while nice, are a little too bold/distracting for a background image. Could we do something like the fog from F26 and maybe make them fade a little more into the water?

Second, I'd really like to see a greater visual continuity with the F26 wallpaper — as someone said at Flock complementing the F26 wallpaper, it really feels like we have a "Fedora look" coming together. Maybe we could bring back some of the lighter cyan/blue from that background, and the kind of gradient feel?

I do not see the wallpapers packed in the latest nightly build. Is there any place where I can find it ?

The packed walllpaper are on https://github.com/fedoradesign/backgrounds/releases
Pagure will not allow exceeding above 20MB.

@luya : Thanks for the link to the github. However I would expect there is f27-backgrounds-27.X.X-X.fc27.src.rpm as part of the compose. Or do I understand wrong the way how it is delivered to the distro ?

@luya : Thanks for the link to the github. However I would expect there is f27-backgrounds-27.X.X-X.fc27.src.rpm as part of the compose. Or do I understand wrong the way how it is delivered to the distro ?

The SRPM is currently under review:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1489160

I was a little busy, but I also express my opinion about improving the Fedora distribution.
- the jellyfish are to 2D , need a resize the small to have a 3D space visual effect.
- the image with fishes are very good.

Another thought for comments.

As to the "fedora look" comment above, maybe something like the below (quick modification of this Public Domain image: https://pixabay.com/en/knobbed-conch-snail-shell-67738/#) could work as well somehow? I actually kind of like the texture here. Perhaps a close zoom or something else? May also play around with hand-drawing the shell element and taking the upper outline of the conch shell as a divide between top/bottom | water/sky.

The last wallpaper was the work of many hands, so any additions/thoughts appreciated. I think @duffy added the softening white elements on the F26 wallpaper (sort of giving a soft framing effect). Perhaps that could be incorporated as well (with the soft blues and a gradient)?

Hi all! Thanks for all of the feedback, and I tried to incorporate as much input as I could, without completely deviating from the jellyfish concept. My thinking with the below concept is:
- more of the f26 feel incorporated (added a similar watercolor texture overlay & lightened up background)
- created 27 jellyfish
- jellyfish are swimming 'up-stream' (another hint at fedora/open-source culture)
- another textural element that went into the background is a zoom-in on a fractal (nod to STEM innovator theme)
*note: I haven't perfected the water-color texture yet so parts of it look kind of clunky, BUT with the assumption that this can be worked on, is this concept closer to the goal than the previous jellies?
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@duffy any feedback here?

@maryshak1996 -- it looks really nice. I like this latest iteration! I almost think you might try pushing the clean lines on the jellyfish into something dirtier/less-clean so that they better blend with the background (maybe filters --> distort --> roughen and dilate)?

One thing I was playing with (which hasn't worked yet) was to take the top line/contour of the seashell and work that into the water itself as a waveform/shape.

I've been working on a jellyfish theme as well. A long time ago I had a jellyfish-type artwork (I called "the squirm").

I really enjoyed the shape and the movement, and I'm trying to think about how to modify that to something a little cleaner for Fedora.

Incorporating the something of Fedora and the release itself into the art was important and the most readily available item was the release number "27." The method quickly became binary #27 ("11011") as the jellyfish tentacles/legs. I re-drew the jellyfish (many versions) and worked off of the colors of the previous wallpaper and headed down into the water (and the depths). Obviously this is a different type of water, but I tried to keep the colors connected.

This is not at all ready yet, but I'd love to have some thoughts/feedback about the direction. It needs coverage (maybe like the soft white in the F26 wallpaper; maybe something else). Appreciate the help and feedback!

@maryshak1996 Hey Mary! I think the main issue is that the jellies are too solid / cartoonish and uniform - you want some variation in the tentacles; I think you want to emulate the look they can have IRL as a white/bright outline with a much more transparent center... EG these particular selections from the pinboard have the look I'm talking about -

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/427208714643464353/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/427208714643464352/

A lot more variation / organic-ness to them would help, and maybe abstract them a bit too. They don't need to read so clearly / be so representative of 'jellyfish', so take advantage of that freedom and try to morph them a bit more abstractly and see what kind of interesting visuals you can come up with for them.

I like where the watercolor texture / gradient is going, they are nice colors!

@duffy @kylerconway thanks for that feedback, that definitely clears up the goal here a lot! I'll be posting some new jellies within the week :)

Now it is getting interesting. How about sightly blurring and fading those jellyfish as if they seemly blend to the water.

@maryshak1996 Those are dramatically different (in a great way)!

One thing that I did on mine for an interesting transparent look was I filled the area the jellyfish would be, created a gradient that faded to either transparent or background color, and used filter --> Overlay --> growing cells (but only on the gradient body).

I think it looked pretty neat. May not work on yours (and, to be honest, I like how ephemeral they are now), but it might be worth a look.

Really great work!

It's subtle, but interesting (maybe).

These look very interesting! I agree with @luya :) Also it would be cool if they were all different from each other.

@maryshak1996 hell yes!!

Thanks @kylerconway I'll give that a try and see how the two compare, and @mleonova I was thinking the same thing, that creating different jellies would add some nice variety too, so I'll draw up a few more and treat them in a similar way to the above :)

@maryshak1996 :thumbsup:

@maryshak1996 how's it coming? we have a week (oct 10 deadline) to get this ready for packaging for the f27 final release.

Hi! I made the updates that @mleonova and @kylerconway suggested (making multiple jellyfish for more variety and adding a cool, but subtle, texture on the body of the jellies)
What are the thoughts on this?
I have time this weekend between Friday and early Sunday to export the final into the various sizes needed, but I want to make sure that it's where we want it before I do that!
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@maryshak1996

the upper right and lower left jellies and lower right look like mirror images of each other - i'd go for more variation.

i'd play with making them look not quite so flat either, eg I'd look at images of moon jellyfish, as they have that similar line quality to them yet they have a shape / dimensions to them, im guessing maybe strategically placed transparent fills might help? check out

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=moon%20jellyfish&tbs=imgo:1

Gave it another try with a new jellyfish that looks more like the moon type. I decided to try it with only one jelly because I feel like it was looking a little busy with so many. I also tried to add more movement, inset the paths of the tentacles to make them look a little lighter, and added a multiple transparency layers to make the body of the jellyfish look a bit less 2D
I exported this new update for each of the sizes, just in case I can't get at this before the packaging goal and anyone wants to make updates

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how about this?

@duffy I like it! I wonder if we could make the speckles on the top of the jelly a bit larger and more organic looking? If you used the "growing cells" overlay discussed previously, there's an option under "filter editor" to decrease the frequency which if I'm remembering correctly created larger, more imperfect looking speckles

Something like this might help to soften the top (changed the frequency of the growing cells overlay as show, added some blur to soften the edges and lowered the opacity of the layer that I applied to the filter to make the the speckles less prominent)... just an idea for the treatment of the top?

@maryshak1996 love it. the one i used is too opaque too. ill give it a whirl.

how about this?

have it exported to all the sizes, running optipng on it over night to try to get the files smaller.

Below is the SVG source, do not evaluate based on this, pagure puts up a preview but the rendering isn't a good representation

Love it!! I think it's subtle and looks awesome :)

I'm also loving this. Could we go just a little lighter (and maybe more towards cyan) to tie in more with Fedora 26?

F26 colors:

Above:

Put everything together, it's here:
https://github.com/fedoradesign/f27-wallpaper

I sent it to @luya for packaging, hoping he can help us out with that!

@mattdm I think if the rest of the team is ok with it, I'd rather leave it as is. I had to run optipng on these overnight, and it's a huge effort to re-export everything at this point. Fedora 26 was a much lighter wallpaper and has some pure white. @maryshak1996 did a great job here getting the watercolor effect with the color blend. I did tweak it a bit more towards cyan based on the design team meeting feedback yesterday, but I didn't go too much over to that end because you lose that beautiful color contrast that really gives the background depth - without it, it just looks like a kind of dirty flat gradient instead of an underwater shot with depth. The color contrast between the cyan jelly tops, the purple-toned strings, the pure blue glow spots, and dark indigo-toned blue bg helps make this work, removing that will also make the image flat and ruin the effect (I tried.)

(note that our pkg deadline is monday, i'm pto this week helping care for a sick family member, so just getting this done was a late-night effort)

It's the design team's call, and I agree that this looks lovely. It's just that establishing visual continuity between releases is really important to me.

Thank you @duffy for doing these last updates, it really looks great!

@mattdm im not sure what you mean by visual continuity, but this is definitely a solidly Fedora-esque background. f26 stuck out against the others; i think it was a successful experiment we'll be able to repeat but in terms of continuity i dont really think this particular wallpaper poses an issue?

what we'd discussed in design team meetings about this wallpaper is that it could be an extension of f26 narratively by depicting below the surface od the f26 water. an idea we had for f28 would be to continue sky ward.

It's the design team's call, and I agree that this looks lovely. It's just that establishing visual continuity between releases is really important to me.

to ME ;)

let me say some things to this topic, we as Fedora are very successful with our design we doing for each release. Whenever I did go to an event I really look what our users have on their desktop, and its very often the default wallpaper. Means the gros of our users like what we do. It also gets reflected in the feedback we get for the wallpaper we do. But talking about feedback we have to say not 100% loved the last one, there are some who wanted something darker. We never hit 100% happy people and doing something same colors as some liked them, makes some others again unhappy :)

And at least when you talking about continuity I seeing the ugly Ubuntu style for me which just changed slightly in colors, so have a look of the ones from ubtuntu 10.10 to 12.10 4 times just slight color changes http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/a-look-back-at-every-ubuntu-default-wallpaper , is that what you want? I dont think so.

Make something different each time has a huge advantage, we always get feedback and that means we have communication with our users and thats for other things a first step, so think a bit about that