GCompris: Patreon and New Logo

Posted on February 11th, 2016

Hello everyone,

A few days ago, I created a page on Patreon to support my work on making new graphics on GCompris. As you may know, last year I started this project, and could make a good start thanks to a little crowd-funding campaign. However there’s a lot of remaining work to finish the task. A lot of activities need to be updated, and new activities will always need some new design and graphics.

So if you want to support GCompris, you can become my patron for this project.
Before resuming my work on the activities, I took the hard and delicate task to update the logo and the main icon of the application.

Now is a good time to have a new icon, for several reasons.
-The old icon had no real meaning, only legacy (which, for a kid that sees GCompris for the first time, doesn’t mean anything)
-Tux is already the mascot of a completely different kind of software. Having him along with other FLOSS mascots inside some activities is cool, but he doesn’t represent enough GCompris to be in the icon.
-The Qt port is still in progress, and it makes sense to have a new icon for it.
-With the new graphics in the application, GCompris needs a good branding that looks good and makes sense.

Also, as some people said they would like to keep the legacy biplane+tux, I tried. I spent countless hours trying to make something looking good, looked at it from every angles. I really couldn’t find a way, and at some point I was feeling like loosing my time.

Full of energy from these failures, I started a new icon from scratch. We had a brainstorm topic on the mailing list recently for a new icon, so I had some indications to begin with. It should mean things like education and gaming, be colorful and cute.

I spare you all the iterations, but after pages of sketches, several proposal and lot of constructive discussions on IRC, here is the final result, along with some explanations:

This is the new icon.
The globe is a symbol for the educational part of GCompris. Also luckily, it is still linked in a way to the idea of the plane from the previous icon. Also it is the same G and orange circle that is used as about button in the main menu.
The dice is a symbol for the gaming part of GCompris, and it also represents counting and maths.
I chose the orange color for the globe for several reasons, probably the most important is because it still contains some yellow from the previous icon, but it is warmer. The blue for the dice adds some contrast.

I tweaked it to follow the main guidelines of Breeze-icon-design, I like the look it gives to it.

This is the new logo with the full name.
It started as a clean-up of the previous one, changing the style and colors of the letters to something soft and colored. Then after making the icon, I added the globe to it, thanks to a suggestion on IRC.

This is a “light” version of the logo, without the globe so it fits better inside a line.

I hope everyone will be happy with this new logo and icon. I know lot of old-timers had some affection for the plane and tux logo, but if you read what I said above, you can see that it was a well considered and discussed change, with lot of good reasons to happen.

Again, if you like my work on GCompris, check this link to see how you can support it. Expect a new activity update next month.

Posted in FLOSS | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

Krita 2.9 Animation Edition beta

Posted on November 24th, 2015

I’m very happy to tell you, finally, a version of Krita supporting basic animation features is released ! (Check it here)

This is still in early stage, based on latest 2.9 version, with lot of additional features to come later from version 3.

If you want to have fun with it, here is a little introduction tutorial to get started, with some text and a video to illustrate it.

-Load the animation workspace to quickly activate the timeline and animation dockers.

-The timeline only has the selected layer. To keep a layer always visible on it, click on the plus icon and select the corresponding option (Show in timeline to keep the selected layer, or Add existing layer and select one in the list …)

-To make a layer animated, create a new frame on it (with the right-click option on the timeline, or with the button on the animation docker). Now the icon to activate the onion skins on it becomes visible (the light bulb icon), activate it to can see previous and next frames.

-The content of a frame is visible in the next frames until you create a new one.

-After drawing the first frame, go further in the timeline and do any action to edit the image (draw, erase, delete all, use transform tool, …). It creates a new frame with the content corresponding to the action you made.

-If you prefer to only create new frames manually, disable the auto-frame-mode with the corresponding button in the animation docker (the film with a pen icon).

-To move a frame in time, just drag and drop it to a new time position

-To duplicate a frame, press Control while you drag and drop it to a new time position.

-In the animation docker, you can define the start and end of the animation (to define the frames to use for export, and for the playback loop). You can also define the speed of the playback with the Frame rate value (frames per second) and the Play speed (multiplier or the frame rate).

-In the Onion Skins docker, you can change the opacity for each of the 10 previous and next frames. You can also select a color overlay to distinguish previous and next frames. You can act on the global onion skins opacity with the 0 slider.

-To change the opacity of several onion skins at the same time, press Shift while clicking across the sliders.

-To export your animation, use the menu entry File – Export animation, and select the image format you want for the image sequence.

Have fun animating in Krita, and don’t forget to report any issue you find to help improve the final version 😉

Posted in Animations, FLOSS | Tagged as: , , ,

Report from Akademy 2015

Posted on August 5th, 2015

A week has passed since I’ve been back from Akademy, so it’s more than time to make a little report.

I’ve enjoyed a lot meeting old and new friends from KDE. Lot of good times shared 🙂

akademy2015-people(photo by Alex Merry ; you can find lot of ther cool photos on this link)

This year I made a quick little talk presenting the result of my work on GCompris. You can find it with all other talks recorded on this page, if you didn’t watch them already.

 

Also I could discuss some ideas for next things to come, so stay tuned 😉

Thanks a lot to KDE e.V for the support, that was another awesome experience.

Posted in FLOSS | Tagged as: , , , ,

Result of the work on GCompris is ready..

Posted on May 15th, 2015

As I finished the work for the time allocated by this campaign, here is a video showing the result:

Of course being only 15% funded, I couldn’t complete the relooking for everything. But at least, I could update all the core components, all the main menu with all activities icons, and a good bunch of activities.

Thanks again to everyone who helped making this possible; more updates about it later…

Posted in FLOSS, Misc. | Tagged as: , , , ,

GCompris: crowdfunding campaign is over, time to start the work

Posted on February 3rd, 2015

Hi,

The crowdfunding campaign we ran on IndieGoGo to support the work on new unified graphics for GCompris finished yesterday. We didn’t reach the goal set to complete the whole new graphics, but thanks to 94 generous contributors, we collected 3642$. Also we got 260€ directly from the Hackadon 2014, many thanks to those contributors too! Thanks again to everyone who contributed and helped to spread the word!

Now after deducing the fees from IndieGoGo, converting to euros and making the sum, the total should be around 3150€, which is enough to cover 25 days of work. This is way less than the full goal, so I have to adapt the plan. Of course I won’t be able to make new artwork for all activities in these 25 days of work, but I’ll make as much as possible to establish good bases for the new design transition. Also I’ll have to rely as much as possible on some of the existing artwork that is already good enough and only adapt the style and do a some edits instead of starting from scratch as much as possible.

I have published the initial proposal for the new artwork guidelines. I will start the work on February 16th, in 13 days, so this should leave enough time for people to review the guidelines and send their opinion and comments (please use the contact form on my main website, or any other way that you’re used to contact me..). I’ll read carefully every comment and apply needed edits to the guidelines. The guidelines proposal is here.

(Edit 02/11/2015: guidelines and examples updated according to reviews)

Then I’ll fulfil these 25 days of work between February and April. Let’s see how much activities I can update in this time 😉

Posted in FLOSS, Illustrations | Tagged as: , , ,