Website to promote Graphic Design and Web Design on Linux/FOSS

[Charles_Souders]

Hi,

I have been doing Professional Graphic Design and Web Design for about 13 years.

The last 2 years have been maininly using Linux/FOSS.

I am in the process of creating a website to promote Graphic Design and Web Design on Linux/FOSS, my goal is to help both new and expericend designers learn to use Linux/FOSS and help them avoid a lot of pitfalls and frustrations.

I would love to hear any feedback about the idea, and also any suggestions, topics, issues or questions people have or would like to see addressed.

Thanks

~Charles

[Dragonbite]

I know the activity has dropped off a lot, but could look at Linux Graphics Users/.

I'm interested to see/hear where you end up going.

[ofnuts]

Hi,

I have been doing Professional Graphic Design and Web Design for about 13 years.

The last 2 years have been maininly using Linux/FOSS.

I am in the process of creating a website to promote Graphic Design and Web Design on Linux/FOSS, my goal is to help both new and expericend designers learn to use Linux/FOSS and help them avoid a lot of pitfalls and frustrations.

I would love to hear any feedback about the idea, and also any suggestions, topics, issues or questions people have or would like to see addressed.

Thanks

~Charles

The idea is nice, but you won't be the first... There are plenty of sites with collections of tutorials but very few explain why things are done that way (when the tutorials themselves aren't squarely misleading...). Pat David's site is an example of what a good Gimp site should be.

Personally, I find I'm more useful answering questions in forums because that's really what people are after, and showing how things are done on their own image has a lot more weight. Of course, there are some questions/misunderstandings that often surface (I have "reference posts" for some of them, to spare me a lot of cut and paste):

• the evilness of the fuzzy and color selection tools
• the difference between the print size and the size in pixels
• how, even if many pictures are 'shopped, taking the right photo first can save hours of editing
• the evilness hidden in the GIF and JPG formats
• why they should be using Inkscape for their logo
• using the command line and ImageMagick
• using layers, and then some more layers

Spend a while in the Gimp forums to get a feeling of what people need. And remember that 75-80% of Gimp users are on Windows...

[Buntu Bunny]

I currently use Gimp and Scribus a lot, and Inkscape a little. Finding good tutorials for these is usually pretty easy, although somewhat hit and miss. YouTube is a big help there. And ofnuts is correct that forums are invaluable, as long as someone can answer one's questions!

That said, I'm all for promoting everything open source and especially graphics tools. It sounds like your new website would do just that. Are you planning to write a series of articles yourself, provide lots of links, or ???

One suggestion would be an article (or series of articles) on how to prepare graphics for print. (Speaking from experience here as I'm struggling to get print color correct on a Scribus 1.5 project).

Charles, do keep us updated on your progress on your website.

[morgan4]

I agreed, GIMP tutorials are easy to find and replicate. Its what I have been using to learn GIMP.

On the otherhand, I haven't even started to use Inkscape so I don't know what is out there for it. I plan on adding it into my artillery soon enough so I might have more feedback to give later.

I think an idea for a community for people in Graphic Design to go who use Linux is a great idea. I would like a central place to talk to individuals and get help with projects, especially with people using the same programs as me.

[Charles_Souders]

Hi Everybody,

Thanks for the feedback, I will try to answer several qustions in this post.

I have had many ideas as far as topics and structure. Right now I think a combination of Wiki documentation/Blog might work well. What I have seen lacking is organized resouce for grapic designers on limux. You can search forumns and tutorials, but the same questions and tutorials get done over and over and the information is scattered all over the place, So my thought was to create a sort of online living book with an orgazined table of contents which can be navigated easily, and each page/post would have comments of some other mechanism to get feedback from the users/readers, which could be periodicaly revied and incorporaded back into the book.

I plan on getting as much feedback from the communuity as possible before moving forward, because I want this to be entirely designed to serve the communtiy.

At some point I would like to enlist an advisory commitiee, content contributers and maintainers to oversee the site.

As far as a central place to get help with projests... my hope is that the site would be designed in a way to make it easy to find most of the answers you need.

However I also interested in making this a community, however I not sure if a forum would be the best structure, does anyone have any suggestions?

The main focus of the site would be around: Linux for Designers, Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus and other tools for design, color management and calibration, press ready artwork, and other information needed to prepare graphics, photos, books, ads, etc for use on the web or in print. Basicaly... how to done professional design work using Linux/Foss.

But more than anything, I would like to know what the real needs of the community are, and how best we can encourace the use of Linux/Foss.