The community voted on our inspiration for F45’s wallpaper here on Fedora discussion, the winner being Alan Turing!
Ideas and progress are going to be documented on GitLab here!
Thank you to everyone who voted and gave comments on the candidates! It’s greatly appreciated! After choosing our inspiration, we had a brainstorming session to do some research on Turing’s life, and figure out different paths we could explore visually for the wallpaper.
Themes to Explore
1. The "Enigma" Aesthetic
You could focus on Turing's work with cryptography and the mechanical aspect of Enigma and Bombe machines.
Possible Visuals: Brass rotors, complex wiring. Take inspiration from blueprint sketches and the "Automatic Computing Engine" (ACE). Mix metallic colors with Fedora blue. Gears could shift or morph into code to indicate the computing aspect.
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
Photo by Amir Balam on Unsplash
In my opinion, the two bottom photos show how beautifully simple things can be captured, when light is taken into consideration. The reflection of the metal grooves on the gears, or light peaking through, makes these photos much more visually appealing than seeing something in direct overhead lighting.
2. Morphogenesis (The Pattern of Life)
Turing became fascinated with Morphogenesis in his later years, which is how patterns like leopard spots and zebra stripes form in nature through math. Morphogenesis also shows up in plants similarly.
Possible Visuals: Patterns you might find in nature. You could blend organic textures with geometric shapes or grids to represent math in nature. A pattern doesn’t have to take over the entire wallpaper, but can flow in a section similar to this old fedora wallpaper.
3. Light & Legacy
Despite all of the work that Turing did to save lives during WWII, his identity was still criminalized. It is possible that he would have lived many more years, contributing greatly to the world, if he had not been prosecuted for being gay. After his death, his legacy helped with the creation of the "Turing Law” that pardoned other gay men who had been convicted at that time.
Possible Visuals: Prismatic light that represents the rainbows associated with the LGBTQ+ community, breaking through the dark.
Reminder!
These themes don’t have to be completely separate for the final wallpaper. In fact, you might start working with one theme in mind, only for another to influence your creative decisions and blend together for the final product. For example, gears interacting with each other, and the light reflecting on them has a rainbow hue.
Wallpaper Requirements
If you would like to share ideas and explore the themes above inspired by Alan Turing, please share your work in the comments on the ticket here on GitLab! Pencil sketches, doodles, digital drawings in Inkscape, Krita, and Procreate- all programs are welcome in this idea generation phase!
The final file format will eventually be a JXL file, at minimum 4096×4096px or 6144 x 6144px, created in an open-source program. This square format allows us to have horizontal and vertical croppings for desktop and mobile Fedora users. The wallpaper’s composition should be the same for both day and night versions, with only the color palette and small details changing to indicate the difference between dark and light mode.
Examples of past wallpapers here.
A successful desktop wallpaper is one that hopefully will boost your mood and productivity when you look at it! Thus, keeping it simple, not too distracting, and usually with a cool color palette (with nods to Fedora blue) is important to remember.
Schedule
The F45 Wallpaper ticket can be found here on GitLab.
The Fedora Design team meeting occurs every week on Mondays at 14:30 UTC. Oftentimes, this project will be discussed there alongside other Design related tasks. If you’re interested in joining, please join the group chat here on Matrix, as we share the link to the meeting in the minutes leading up to it.
This is a laid-back / chill but also a super-respectful, calm, encouraging, and safe environment. Aka bring your coffee. All of the Fedora Code of Conduct rules apply.
The following stages of the project and the dates they coincide with:
Sketches and Rough Draft - Feb. 16 - March 6th
“Beta” Wallpaper - March 6th - April 13th
Reach out for Feedback from the Community - April 13-20th
Final Wallpaper - April 20th - June 30th
Hope you enjoyed this blogpost on the wallpaper’s process, and hope to see you around Fedora!