# Debian Design team BoF 2017-08-06

  * Design culture in Debian
    * Welcome new designers into Debian - both users and developers
  * Debian used for design work
    * Find and package design-related FLOSS tools    
    * Maintain a blend optimized for designers to use
  * Assets
    * Find and package existing Free design assets   
    * Maintain a platform for creating and curating Free design assets
    * Locate and/or author documentation of designing assets using Free tools
  * Streamlining
    * Improve designability during package installation
    * Improve design in Debian
    
* Points brought up during intro round
    * Relate accessibility to design and vice versa
    * Translations (not Debian specific)
    * Improve the communication Way-of-working (don't limit to e-mail and IRC)
      but also Web forums and modern communciation channels 
    * Design stability (escaping the upgrade treadmill / users not wanting to
      to learn UIs because they'll change anyway)
    * needs for a design paradigm can go away, and so will the blends or
      interfaces
    * forking blends as a nursery for design ideas where experimentation is
      freeer and can later be upstreamed into main
    * gather ideas / problem statements to be passed on to upstreams rather
      than implementing solutions ourselves
    * don't implement stuff in Debian which are upstream issues
    * language barrier in Debian contribution (eg. NM process; also cultural
      differences (mailing lists and IRC vs forum and social network))
    * solicit input from non-developers whose understanding of how software
      works is different from that of technical users

* Thoughts:
    * Where are design issues located?
        - widget toolkits (GTK-X, Qt-Y, ...)
          (i.e. 5 different printer dialogs on the same desktop)
        - widget theming
        - desktop/application theming
        - icon theming
        - login managers, greeters (normal theming of login managers is
          not directly related to the corresponding desktop's theming)
          to 
        - CMS / Website python-typing imagemagick-6.q16 librsvg2-bin
python-typing imagemagick-6.q16 librsvg2-bin
etc. theming
        - general artwork (like current desktop-base package)
          -> grub bootloader, plymouth, backgrounds
        - default key bindings

     * What of the above can we address in Debian directly (without or with
       only a little upstreaming)?
         - general artwork
         - pick a certain theme per desktop and per widget toolkit
           make things look similar, do this for all desktops available in
           Debian
           -> i.e. choose a combination of existing design patters)
         - patch style sheet files for CMS / Website packages
         - modify gsettings schema files (some define fonts, colors, etc. that
           are to be used)
         - patch design related settings in packages that present itself
           visually (or otherwise)

* Who can do what?

  Designers:
    - provide/recommend combinations of themes (that already exist in Debian
      or outside Debian)
    - recommend a console color theme 
    - integrate those combinations of fonts, colors, themes, etc. into one or
      more "design" packages
    - ensure the blend evolves to continue to meet the use case, stability
      alone will cause stagnation. Underlying apps will always go stale.
  Packagers:
    - package themes recommended by "the designers"
    - integrate hooks into to-be-themed packages that pick up "design
      information" from the designers and patch upstream's defaults "somehow"
  Upstream Devs (hopefully):
    - accept patches from packagers that ease design modifications
      on the downstream side

What we can not or hardly do as distro maintainers?

  * Fixing the 5 different printing dialogs is probably tricky... (and all
    similar issues regarding to different technologies used for programming
    desktop and such)

## Resources
  * infinote://gobby.debian.org/debconf17/bof/design
  * https://wiki.debian.org/Design
  * https://collab.debian.net/