GSoC part 3: mockups, mockups, mockups!

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This will be a quick blog post on the previous two weeks. During this time, the community bonding period ended and the coding phase officially begun!

I spent most of the first week working on university projects, so that those are as done as they can be at this point and I have little else to work on besides Piper.

On the second week, I thought I would get a few days head start on my schedule by starting early on the mockups. Having never used Inkscape before, I thought this would be quite the challenge for someone as artistically inept as myself. To my surprise, however, it was easy to get going and a lot of fun! I must admit that I mostly copy/pasted individual elements from GNOME’s design team (seriously cool stuff they publish on their GitHub for others to use); I mostly just positioned them where I wanted them to be. Nonetheless, it is great fun and I might dive in to Inkscape more later when I need to.

Piper’s scope is quite well defined and the feature set my mentor and I discussed for my proposal held up well until now. It took one round-trip of emails to have that decided and by that time, I already started on some of the designs. After a few back and forths, we decided that the discussion should be out in the open instead of a private email thread. The result is the Piper Redesign page. I won’t repeat the same stuff here so if you are curious, do pay it a visit! The next step is to gather feedback and process that, before the last step where I want to discuss the design with GNOME’s design team if possible to get it truly finalized. You won’t be able to edit the page to leave feedback, but if you have any feel free to send me an email – I’ll make sure it gets processed!

Hopefully, all that will be done soon so that I can start putting things together and stay ahead of schedule. Until next time!

This blog post is part of a series. You can read the next part about the first sprint here or the previous part about the community bonding period here.