And just like that, the Fedora 43 Wallpaper has been finalized!

I recently attended Flock (for the first time 😮) at the beginning of the summer. I had the privilege of facilitating a workshop with Emma Kidney about getting started in the Fedora Design Team. You can read Emma’s workshop recap here if you didn’t get the opportunity to attend! Participants helped create inspiration for the F44 wallpaper.

Now that it’s the end of the summer, I thought it might be a good time to discuss the F43 wallpaper process.

The final F43 Day Wallpaper

The final F43 Night Wallpaper

Let’s rewind to the start

If you’re not a blog post person, then you can always see the process documented on the F43 ticket here.

The first step involves a list of people or topics in STEM that the community can vote on. We were choosing between people whose last name starts with R, since we’ve followed the alphabet for the past 18 wallpapers.

Jess Chitas wrote on the ticket, “Thinking of ones that would make really nice wallpapers- Vera Rubin was an Astronomer who worked on galaxy rotation rates. Rooting for this one myself, a galaxy wallpaper would be epic! Wilhelm Röntgen essentially discovered the X-ray. Something with the skeleton could be cool? Henry Augustus Rowland worked with diffraction gratings (lots of colour!!)

Vera Rubin and Wilhelm Röntgen made it into the poll (which can be found here on Fedora discussions), but Sally Ride ultimately won!

Sally Ride

“Everywhere I go I meet girls and boys who want to be astronauts and explore space, or they love the ocean and want to be oceanographers, or they love animals and want to be zoologists, or they love designing things and want to be engineers. I want to see those same stars in their eyes in 10 years and know they are on their way.“- Sally Ride

Sally Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was a physicist and astronaut who became the first American woman in space on June 18, 1983. The third woman ever!

After finishing her training at NASA, she served as the ground-based CapCom for the second and third Space Shuttle flights. She helped develop the Space Shuttle’s robotic arm, which helped her get a spot on the STS-7 mission in June 1983.

Two communication satellites were deployed, including the first Shuttle pallet satellite. Ride operated the robotic arm to deploy and retrieve SPAS-1, which carried ten experiments to study the formation of metal alloys in microgravity. 

Mind Map

The mind map we created together in a design team meeting.

Based on Ride’s career, we started gathering images. We looked up the books she had worked on that had exclusive photographs of her missions. Her work in education and STEM made us think of the infographic posters that usually hang in classrooms. Ride’s mission happened in the 80s, which is technically too late to classify as mid-century. However, the bright, colorful mid-century space art and retro futurism felt perfectly suited to represent her optimism and approach to learning in STEM.

Sketches

I usually do quick sketches on paper or my iPad and came up with these three options. The first one isn’t a wallpaper, so much as a blueprint for an exploring spacecraft. More realistic vs ones with exaggerated shapes for children’s books. I was much happier with the second and third compositions. That’s why we always push to come up with multiple ideas, because it’s like working a muscle. The design muscle!

People commented on the ticket that we could go forward with sketch 2 or sketch 3. I brought sketch 2 into Krita and started drawing over it on a new layer. I wanted to map out how the clouds would billow out and where stars could be.

Rough and Final Drafts

At this point, I received feedback from people on the Fedora Design team. It was suggested to bring the clouds on the right down a little and perhaps add a moon in the sky. The color and arch of the sunrise and sunset were also things we discussed in our weekly team meeting (open to community members 😉), and I believe they turned out pretty great.

Post F43 Thoughts

Without the community, these wallpapers wouldn’t happen! If you’re a passionate artist or designer, you’re more than welcome to participate in this recurring project.