I have now made my way home with a lot news to bring you about my experiences at GUADEC 2014.

Promotional Videos

I gave a lighting talk! I showed briefly the steps to go through when making promotional videos and gave a sneak peak of the soon-to-be-released documentation video. I also had a good talk with Petr about translating video subtitles. This had lead to a git repository called “video-subtitles” in which I’ll upload subtitles for the translation team to translate. The last days of GUADEC I began to work on some animation templates for recycling and I plan to expand this collection. During the conference I received a lot of positive remarks on the 3.12 release video. It makes me very happy that so many people appreciate the promotional videos! I’m definitely motivated to do more.

An idea for a future promotional video: A passive repeatable video which can run on computer screens at GNOME booths during conferences. Original Image by Tobias Muellner.

GNOMEs Website

Karen’s talk inspired me to do some design concepts for our website. I made a mockup for our donation page and for “Getting involved”. During the Engagement BoF we discussed how these pages and the front page could be improved. Allan, Fabiana and Andreas began working on a mockup for the front page on the whiteboard, structuring the information based on importance. Hopefully we’ll begin to see site improvements within the coming months.

My proposed concept design for “Getting Involved”. Note that the concept represents my own personal idea, not the consensus of the engagement team.

Avatar Designigng

Before I left I was working a bit on the design of the generated avatars as they needed revision. I updated the tentative design with a second revision, simplifying them a bit. I asked Allan for feedback and he began a journey to find a more suiting font to write the generated initials with than the one I had found. The tricky part in this is to find a suiting font which also has a large coverage of unicode characters, for free. I had to leave before Allan settled on any final font, though, but I heard that him and Garett worked further on the revamping the font and colors.

My initial generated avatar proposal, which since then has been revamped by Allan and Garret in terms of font, colors and style.

Volunteering

I made some great experiences while volunteering at GUADEC. I was volunteering Friday, Saturday and partly Sunday as backup. I have also volunteered for doing video editing of the GUADEC talks in collaboration with Alexander Franke, so expect to see them up on guadec.org soon! GUADEC was a great opportunity to meet other members and friends of the GNOME community. I met a lot of interns while volunteering and met many other new faces when going for dinner in the Strasbourg. I also had a chance to meet with designers from gnome-design and members of the engagement team. The venue was located very centrally in Strasbourg with many restaurants, bars and shops nearby. Furthermore, the GUADEC organizers had organized events in the evenings such as a picnic and playing snooker.

Now I am exhausted. It is nice to be home again and I am bringing a lot of experiences with me. I’ve put faces on a lot of names I only have encountered in IRC. I’ll probably be sending a mail or pinging one or two of you in the coming weeks. A big hug goes to GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me. Thank you!