Xfce design SIG

[Simon Steinbeiß]

Hey everyone,

my name is Simon Steinbeiß and I've been working with the Xubuntu
development team during the last two releases and contributed some
artwork there. I'm also part of the "shimmer
project" (http://shimmerproject.org/) and together with my colleague
Pasi Lallinaho we're trying to contribute design ideas and artwork to
existing opensource projects. I've always been interested in UI design
and as a long-time Xfce user obviously also in Xfce design :)

Up to now there haven't been any bottom-up design initiatives in Xfce,
mainly users could file a bugreport/feature request, bug the developer
on irc or use the mailing-list. What I want to propose together with
Jannis Pohlmann is an Xfce design SIG (special interest group) that
doesn't consist of a fixed number or panel of members, but instead
features a very open approach: anyone can join the design SIG and
contribute to a task or propose a new task. Naturally this doesn't mean
that everything/anything the design SIG proposes will be picked up and
put into code by developers. The idea is that users and developers try
to get to a point where they say "This is what we think a good
$application (as in: image viewer, file-manager, etc.) should look
like."

We really want to connect interested users, designers and hackers -
create a platform for them so that none of them feels he/she is working
in a vacuum. We hope that this way things get done more successfully in
a cooperative manner.

We decided to use the Xfce Wiki as our homebase, this is where you can
find the current projects and project proposals
(https://wiki.xfce.org/design/start). At the moment there are already a
few Thunar related projects/proposals, but we hope that other
applications will also get some attention. One project has already been
completed, which improved Thunar's window layout
(https://wiki.xfce.org/design/thunar/window-layout).

There are different ways of approaching us and bringing about a new
idea. One way is via the xfce4-dev at xfce.org mailinglist, but obviously
you can also reach out to people on irc (#xfce-dev on freenode). If you
already have a fully-fledged idea you can write a project proposal in
our wiki page.

At the moment we're working on a new sidepane-viewmode for Thunar
(https://wiki.xfce.org/design/thunar/shortcuts-pane), we've already
started gathering resources and information on that topic, but we could
use your help with ideas and mockups.

Looking forward to your contributions and fruitful discussions to make
Xfce more beautiful than it already is!
All the best
Simon