Technical advisory group to the artists.

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

We need new artwork for Amarok 2. The current look was "good enough"
to get us started, but it could look so much better. A while back ( I
forget exactly when, but early 2008 or so ) we had a big meeting with
some of the Oxygen artists, but nothing really came from that, partly
because there was no agreement on overall direction, but mainly
because of the different perspectives of us ( the Amarok devs. ) and
the artists. The constraints we are used to working with differ too
much for such a meeting to be very productive.

To get things rolling again, a few of us have been slowly setting up a
dialog with Nuno and a few other artists. This has deliberately been
kept fairly low visibility as we really needed to find a way to
proceed before actually starting to work on the look of Amarok 2, and
many of the artist were a bit unhappy with the last meeting where the
signal to noise ratio got _very_ low. As such, no discussion has taken
place on how Amarok should eventually look, but only on how to get the
process started.

What has been found so far, is that the artists really need a direct
line of communication to ask questions about how to integrate artwork
with the technical foundations of Amarok, and about what can be
changed to accommodate their ideas if they do not fit within the
current overall layout.

So to start out with, Dan (leinir), Leo and I will be filling in the
role as technical advisory group to the artists. We think that we
cover most bases on the technical and usability issues involved, and
the artists very quite adamant that there should be at most 3 people
they should ask about these issues to keep it functioning smoothly.
Bear in mind that this is not about determining how Amarok  2 will
eventually look, all the artists proposals will be discussed and
decided upon by the entire team ( in our usual chaotic way :-) ), but
simply a forum for discussing the technical issues of how to do
artwork for Amarok.

- Nikolaj