[rant] let's change the process for visual material creation

Hi,

I'm sorry, but I think we should re-consider our approach to the 
outreach material creation process. We have a couple of people
with design capabilities in this group, and we should either
trust their skills or reject their offerings early. I mean, we
started with the flyer in March, and we are not only wasting
resources big time, but it's also frustrating for the people 
who volunteered in the first place. SWEO is going to need a 
lot of flyers and stuff, and I doubt Dunja and Paula are going
to go through this again. I know that W3C means consensus etc,
but in this case we are going to end up with a mediocre result.

Or even worse, with no result at all: The comm team is currently
working on a branding strategy for the semweb, i.e. they are
most likely to hold back the flyer finalization until then, and
after that we'll have to start from scratch (at least design-wise), 
missing another round of events where we could have distributed
our material.

Read this rant with a grain of salt as it's partly driven by
my experience to create a logo but not being able to convince
the group to go for something more abstract. (Guess what the comm
team is going to use now..) This is not a "why not mine"-rant,
the comm team proposals are way better, hands down, and our work
wasn't a complete waste (creative work never is). But I suggest
to let volunteering designers JFDI (I've seen webxcerpt flyers
before, they have always been cool, definitely cool *enough* for
SWEO), or to say "no, don't like your stuff at all".

In the latter case, we stop blocking resources, and they still
have the opportunity to create and distribute material w/o the
W3C/SWEO blessing, which is still better than no output at all
(that's at least the road I started to think taking recently). 

We could have three flyers by now, just from the wealth of ideas
we had, but we desperately try to squeeze everything into a 
single flyer everyone is happy with, losing week after week.
Who cares if one is pink as long as it gets the message across?
Giving feedback is great, splitting hairs is not.

I could go on with the portal. Calling something a "Design" when
it looks like a W3C page is pretty close to an oxymoron. We just
shouldn't do that (unless we say design is not important).

Bottom line: Too many geeks just spoil the broth (and block
the kitchen ;)

Having said that, and to end with a positive tone, the branding
coming from the comm team is going to be really cool, and it's 
not limited to the SemWeb effort. Creating stylish stuff based
on it will be a treat, and with a bit of luck they may get the
sign-off before mid-August.


benji

--
Benjamin Nowack
http://bnode.org/

Received on Friday, 20 July 2007 07:59:23 UTC