I recently had the opportunity to attend GUADEC in Thessaloniki, Greece thanks to a travel sponsorship from the GNOME Foundation. So what is GUADEC? It’s a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference run by the GNOME Foundation, held annually and attended by GNOME contributors, supporters, and community members from all over the world. But what does a graphic designer do at a FOSS conference? As it turns out, plenty. While none of the talks were specifically about graphic design, there was a healthy amount about UI/UX and the design of the GNOME project and I was able to attend a few of those. However, I spent most of my time running around managing last-minute printing, organizational duties, or assigning volunteers tasks. I’m a doer, I always feel much more comfortable in a new situation if I have a job to accomplish. I’m not great at mingling but I can hand out instructions like nobody’s business.
Going back to the beginning, I was part of the organizing team for this year’s GUADEC. My role, you may have guessed, was to handle everything design/print but I also took on a few more tasks at the conference itself, like managing the volunteers. I’ve only been contributing to GNOME for just over a year so GUADEC’s design look long outdated my work with the foundation. It’s a pretty simple concept: heavy use of GNOME’s main blue, white, and grey palette, Cantarell, and one main graphic feature—a skyline of the hosting city. Since the location of the conference changes every year the skyline changes as well. This year I built the skyline graphic using photographs of Thessaloniki’s main landmarks. Being in Greece, there were a lot of historical buildings to choose from. I traced the shapes of each landmark, creating vector outlines, and pulled all of my pieces together to figure out the best layout. The graphics aren’t accurate depictions of the hosting city’s actual skyline, they’re only supposed to show enough distinguishing features to feel like they represent the city as a whole.
After the skyline is created the rest of the pieces are fairly formulaic. Using the same palette, font, and graphic, I created a host of supporting assets: Web banners, social media posts, web badges (for attendees to share on their blogs or posts), sponsorship banners, name badges, and t-shirts. The t-shirts are one area where there can be quite a lot of change from one year to the next. After some back and forth with feedback from the team, I ended up creating four versions of the event shirt. The team narrowed it down to two and we decided to go ahead and print both. One shirt became the event shirt and included pieces of the skyline graphic along with the event location and date, the second became a release shirt because the next GNOME release is named after the city that hosted GUADEC. I removed the event name and date and simply included the name of the release/city. This shirt was a hit and sold out quickly at the conference, going forward I think we’ll work on creating more release themed shirts because of this success.
This year we also launched a companion app for the conference. The app held all of the speaker, schedule, and social event details, had map functionality, pulled in twitter feeds, and allowed for an assortment of informational pages like emergency contacts, code of conduct, photo policy, travel tips, etc. This app was put together by my fiancé, Britt, and a team of volunteers simply because I was sitting around our office complaining about making a print schedule last-minute (as everyone knows print schedules are notoriously inaccurate because something always changes after they’re printed) and how perfect it would be if there was a FOSS app that we could put all of that information into. Britt, like me, is a doer and only about an hour later he had found the perfect solution. Using Connfa, an app created by Lemberg, a Ukrainian based software development company, for DrupalCon a couple of years ago, Britt and team undertook a massive amount of work to update the code and turn this app into something we could use for GUADEC. My role was much smaller here, complaining, critiquing, and supplying the graphics.
That sums up most of the work I did leading up to GUADEC, but of course day-of, there were a million more little print things I wish I had thought of and handled before-hand. All I can say is now that I’ve attended one, I have a better idea of how to improve my role going forward and a much larger task list to accomplish for next year. I am so thankful for the opportunity to attend and the support from GNOME that helped me get to Greece. Thanks, everyone for putting on a great conference!
