Sliced Visual Design Time

Hi everyone,

the first blog posting since weeks ... although I'm still fascinated to experience the first time with our child, I'm still (at least mentally) with LibreOffice. Some vacation from my day job helped me to spend a bit more "LibO time" (which is currently hard to predict). Since we travelled a lot, visual design stuff was something easy to work on "in slices".

New Banners for the Website 

Currently, our different websites (e.g. the conference website, the donation website) are only losely coupled. For a quick-fix, banners had to be added to the  LibreOffice front page ... unfortunately, nobody within the Design Team was able to spend some time on that. Instead, David was so kind to develop a first version.

These banners got replaced by new ones following more closely our branding language (and using Nik's and Paulo's artwork). Now, our website looks like that ...

If anybody wants to pick that up, for example to derive default web banners, or to translate the text - the source SVG file is here.


Conference Presentation Template

Some weeks ago, Charles asked for a presentation template for the upcoming LibreOffice conference in Paris (side note: don't forget to register...). Since I was always unhappy about the conference templates we had for the OOoCons, I decided to give it a try ...

The template proposal implements what I've usually missed, e.g.:

• providing much space for the content (which is more important than any logo)
• proper use of master pages incl. footer area definitions: first slide, default slide, section header slide, last slide
• pre-defined shapes / graphic object styles / gradients for the presentation authors
• correct language settings (spellchecking should work for English)
• font fallback definitions if some are missing on the target system
• small size for those who want to download the final presentations afterwards (having no broadband access)
• taking care of our LibreOffice branding language

So, let's see what template proposal will be picked :-) If you want to have a closer look, here is the template proposal.

Stuff for the Hackfest in Munich 2011

Most of you have (should have) heard about the Hackfest in Munich, 2011. Florian asked for a logo ... so I initially drafted some fun motto:

Curious? Maybe this and that makes it more understandable...

However, others joined with proposals. After some mixing and matching, I came up with a combination of the conference logo text and our macro icon (LibO initial icon design). I hope the devs don't mind the gearwheel ...

Well, a logo doesn't help much. So I've added some information panels / sheets that can easily be printed (A4). There are versions without content (for on-site labeling), explanation text, different directions and the motto text. Here is an example:

Of course, source files are available - so feel free to use them for your meeting.

Final Words

Since I talked about "LibO time is less predictable", I owe Caolan, Cedric, Bjoern, Josh, Rainer, Nik, Drew, Andreas, Bjoern (another one) and many others a big thank your for their patience. Please, if something is urgent or I did miss to reply - then please feel free to send a reminder.

I really hope to continue with some user experience / usability related stuff ... some issues and other requests are still waiting.

Enjoy your day,
Christoph