New background

[Diana Fong]

John Baer wrote:
> 1. When I view the new background on my Dell laptop the brighter image
> did not display as well the original. On this computer I believe
> something brighter than the original but darker than the current would
> be the best solution. I must add this wasn't as big of an issue on my
> desktop. The 810 video chip on the Dell may be the reason.
>   

Eks...How bad is it? is not well = bad or just not as good when 
switching between the original and new wallpaper?  I've been testing it 
on my mac laptop, Dell CRT (can't remember the model), hp pavilion f1903 
flatscreen and VeiwSonic PT813 CRT...they all look slightly different.  
The first three being bright and the last one being pretty dark.  =(  
I've come up with a method for testing which  is to just see how the 
icons (along with it's text) and windows look on top of it.  Given the 
context of icons and windows, I think each (bright or dark) looked ok.  
Please let me know...I can try to tweak it some more.

> 2. This is just me but I really liked the crystal/glass look of the ball
> on the first design. I would encourage you to go back to that concept.
>   

I did/do like the glass sphere as well but in the brighter version it 
looked less convincing.  It looked ok in the smaller pieces but to be 
consistent I've also changed those to the newer sphere.  It was a bit of 
a hard decision to make and Mola explored quite a few different 
materials in his renderings for a better fit.  We went with this one 
because it sat well within the existing environment, was fairly clean 
and still interesting.  There had also been a couple of other comments 
against the glass look because you could see through it and the lack of 
detail behind it was confusing some people, causing them to have see the 
helix as disconnected from the strands. I really did like the glass 
sphere and was a little sad to see that it wasn't really working as 
well.  But I think the new sphere is pretty good. =)

> Given the amount of time and the number of graphics to be finalized I
> believe you and Mola are probably the best choice in wrapping this up.
> If you keep your status page updated I will be happy to test and provide
> feedback on how they look.
>   

Excellent.  I've been updating http://people.redhat.com/dfong/fc6graphics/
with new improvements.  If you could take a look, test, and make 
comments on the wiki it would be super.  Since as you've noticed, time 
is running out and the new bits could really benefit from testing. =)

> If you have a specific need and if you believe inkscape or gimp will
> craft it, always willing to help.

=) I've looked at your splash screen approaches. The ideas were good, 
though I think a few of them did not match the current theme. We should 
keep those and bring them up in the next release as possible themes.  I 
really like the fedora tag one.  However, your experiments did prompt me 
to try creating .svg ribbons for the 16 color limitations.

Please take a look at the variations.  Let me know 1) if it is too 
dark/light 2) if the pixelation is tolerable.
http://people.redhat.com/dfong/fc6reGraphics/syslinux-splash01.png
http://people.redhat.com/dfong/fc6reGraphics/syslinux-splash02.png
http://people.redhat.com/dfong/fc6reGraphics/grub.png
note: I had to make the grub lighter because the highlight for text is 
black.

Thanks!
Diana