Hi! I'm Mel Chua (
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Mchua). I'm new to
the Design team, though I hang out in Marketing and Websites and am
generally watching and learning in a lot of places.
I studied engineering (electrical, so the FEL redesign ticket was an
"ooh, shiny" one for me) and am, in general, obsessed with education.
I'm currently a Community Architecture intern at Red Hat; open-source
communities are awesome. I actually originally planned on studying art
and graphic design in college, but my parents said no, so I took up
engineering instead and crammed design classes into my schedule. Being
at an engineering school, these classes were more product design and
ethnography than anything that would actually improve my
art/color/layout skills, so while I have (for instance) some
interviewing mojo, my actual "making things" abilities are not so great.
After seeing Mo transform my POSSE logo sketch (documented on
http://blog.melchua.com/2009/07/11/the-posse-logo-progression/) into a
thing of Awesomeness, I went "...oh wow, I want to learn to do that!"
And so I'm here. I probably won't have a ton of bandwidth to do 100%
Design Stuff - maybe a few things in conjunction with Marketing, or
Websites, since I'm working on those anyway - but at the least I'll
watch and learn, and if I'm able to help out, I shall. I am particularly
curious about...
* the design process (how do you tell whether a design is "good"? I
don't know how to frame this question properly.)
* colors. Because I can't figure out how to develop an eye for color, no
matter what I try.
* paper prototyping and other quick-and-dirty mockup techniques for user
testing
I tried taking my first ticket as per the join instructions, which was a
hackergotchi (really, really small project). I wasn't sure whether you
had to wait for approval for the list before commenting on the ticket,
so I erred in the "release early release often" direction since this was
a tiny, tiny ticket... let me know if I should do anything different
next time.
https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/51#comment:1
--Mel
PS: I have been reading the archives and looking through old tickets and
I am in awe. You folks have mad, mad skillz.