General Screenshot Screenshot "Guidelines"

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

GNOME is moving toward a clean productive desktop. This sort of
contrasts us with KDE who tend toward a tweakable fiddly feature packed
desktop. Screenshots are an important way people get a sense of what
GNOME is about; even a false sense (which I think a lot of cluttered
screenshots present). Here are some things I'd personally think we
should highlight about GNOME:

  1) Good international support
  2) Accessibility (at least one shot of GNOME with a11y apps and themes
going!)
  3) Clean, simple design
  4) New features/applications in the GNOME 2.2 release

Some specific notes:

1) Cluttered shots don't make GNOME look good, which is most of the
point of screenshots. People will be more impressed with GNOME if it
isn't plastered in windows.

2) Terminals (transparent and otherwise) are, like, so last decade. We
know what they look like. They don't present a very friendly image of
GNOME. Move along, nothing to see here ;-)

3) Nautilus looks really pretty, and is excellent material for
screenshots, but we don't need a Nautilus window in every screenshot. We
should also try to show different aspects of Nautilus. For example, it
might be nice to have a shot of Nautilus without toolbar, sidebar,
status bar, browsing a music collection (with nicely setup album folder
icons).

I think Kenneth's screenshot is a great model of the things that make a
good screenshot:
http://www.gnome.org/~kenneth/Gnome-i18n-da-(Danish).png

-Seth

On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 04:00, Murray Cumming wrote:
> For the GNOME 2.2.0 release announcement, as well as having
> functionality-specific screenshots such as the stuff here
> http://www.gnome.org/start/2.1/
> we'd like to show people the usual collection of impressive, pretty, and
> ocassionally wacky full desktop screenshots. So please reply with URLs
> of your GNOME 2.2 screenshots before February 5th. Please don't use
> backgrounds that we are likely to get complaints about.
> 
> -- 
> Murray Cumming
> murray usa net
> www.murrayc.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list