My unsolicited feedback about the submission process for utopian
Yesterday @elear asked me for my feedback about the process used for submissions.
These are a recording of my thoughts about the submission process for the graphics category of utopian. I wrote them immediately after publishing my submission to @utopian-io, but scheduled a publication date in the future because I do not want to taint the experience. Because I am going to be training people how this works, it is important for me to really understand the process in depth.
So here goes:
The good:
- I documented the work in minute detail, which is more than I usually do for graphic design.
- I really did my due-diligence with regard to clearing the assets and placed the watermark in the final file.
- At the end of it I was proud enough of the work to link to it on the affinity forum:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/64611-quasar-on-steem/ - I had an idea for extending Affinity with a "history-to-video" plugin.
The Bad:
- I expected for my first time doing this that I would spend an hour. I spent four because my documentation during the process wasn't good enough. So I turned off layers to show stages in the project and made screenshots of them which is not EXACTLY how the process unfolded.
- It wasn't really clear from the template exactly what I should be doing, so in some cases I just guessed. Part of the problem was due to grammar errors, so I made a PR. Most critical: which repository should be listed first???
- The notion that I should make it reproducible was hard to swallow, and the fact that it is possible to submit psd or other proprietary filetypes means that it is not reproducible for everyone. (I'll talk about this point below.)
The Ugly
- The recommended project that I used as a reference did not follow the given template explicitly, which was kind of a disconnect.
- Licensing is unclear, because MIT / GPL does not technically apply to graphic works - unless they are generated, and then it's the code not the artefact that is protected. I think that there should be a definite clearing here. I am ok, because I signed and made explicit reference to the Quasar FLA that considers these issues.
Takeaways
Documentation is super important. You feel good after doing it, kind of like sports. BUT!!! Documentation should not be hard.
Licensing of visual assets is a minefield, and code-licenses do not apply. Unfortunately good will is not enough and this should be resolved ASAP.
The degree of openness of a visual asset is something that should be considered and given weight to. As in, there is a difference between submitting a TIFF file with layers and a PSD file with layers, just as there is a difference between an SVG and an AI file. The latter types are proprietary and require that anyone wanting to use the source file also has access to the programme. This is a very important point.
It is so important, that I recommend you take a moment to read this article that I wrote several years ago - and then look at this PDF.
http://ionary.org/openness/
http://ionary.org/content/images/2016/5/degrees_of_openness_praesi.pdf