Re: Designer/UI artist wanting to contribute to AbiWord

Ben Greig wrote:

>
> Hello all,
> I am a media designer in Melbourne, Australia who has been
> delighted to discover AbiWord. I would like to offer my design
> services to create icons/symbols, logo devel and general interface
> development for AbiWord. My first interest of course (being a
> designer) is to clean up the UI for Mac OS X, but what I would like to
> do is to create a clean and professional UI for all platforms
> (including the different flavors for different operating systems). For
> the next few months unfortunately I will be swamped with work, but
> come october I will be able to contribute time. If people are
> interested though I will make a mockup of UI impovements to one OS
> over the next few weeks as a show of what is possible.
>
> Please let me know if you are interested and keep up the well wicked
> work ;-)
>
> Benji
>
>
I guess this is my catch... :)

Thanks for coming! We could always use more help, especially with the
Mac OS X version. Hub's in charge of that, so I'll let him respond
there. With regard to the "clean and professional UI", I'm not sure how
much budging room we have. As a GNOME Office project, we use the
default GNOME toolbar buttons to integrate, and IMHO they look pretty
nice in Windows too. As the design guy who can't quite get the hang of
the Abi codebase yet, I've designed a new art set (splash screen, icons,
web site) using our licensed trademarks all set for 2.2, the next major
release (seach list archives for discussion thereon). We've got some
stuff that I think people are liking, and in favor of, with regards to
that. If you're familiar with the UI guidelines for Mac OS X, GNOME,
etc, we could probably use some help with the layout of dialogs and
such. The project has sort of prided itself on the small footprint and
clean design of the interface, so I'm not sure how much work there is to
be done there, you'd have to talk to Hub about Mac OS.

Of course, if, by chance, you are familiar at all with the Windows API,
GDI, etc and C++, we could use some help stomping out bugs there, as
we're a bit short on Windows devs. :-D

Ryan

P.S. Afterthought to keep you from having to dig for this link in the
archives: http://www.ryand.net/oss/abi is my site that features fairly
recent versions of the work I've got ready for 2.2. It may be a few
tweaks behind my latest revision, but should be fairly close to the
"state of the art" Abi design. I don't do much in the rest of the UI,
though, mainly due to the nice GNOME/GTK icons we have. :)
Received on Fri Jul 30 04:02:52 2004