Fedora User Stories: Máirín Duffy

I was taking a look at the website of Fedora, when I entered a page where there is a series of Interviews that is done to some users, where each one explains in their own way why they use this distribution.

I chose one of them which I found very interesting to share with you and I will put them below.

Máirín, artist and designer

Máirín Duffy, designer and graphic artist from Boston (United States), exclusively uses Fedora for all her designs. Websites, graphic mockups, t-shirts, posters, usability tests - use Fedora to do it all. Do you have a creative streak? Máirín recommends lots of applications in Fedora!

Where are you from?

I was born in Queens, New York, and there I grew up and studied there. Today I live in Boston, Massachusetts.

What is your profession?

I am an interaction designer and I work at Red Hat. As an interaction designer, what I do is create user interface designs, statistical charts, sketches, diagrams, and graphs to help build elegant and usable software.

What is your IRC nickname?

Mizmo. I know it exists a kind of fishing company called «Mizmo» - but that's not why I'm Mizmo! Since my name is Máirín (the Irish way of spelling 'Maureen'), many of my friends call me 'Mo', and 'Miz' stands for 'Miss', so Mizmo is simply 'Miss Mo'.

When did you start using Fedora?

Well, I started using Red Hat 5.0 when I was in high school. When I entered college, I carried Red Hat Linux with me, but the University Linux user group convinced me that Debian was best. So I used Debian until the first year of my PhD, when I tried Fedora Core 3 (I wanted to know the latest version of GNOME, and the one included in Debian was too old). I have been a Fedora user ever since. So more or less since 2004.

How did you get started in interaction design?

I grew up playing adventure games on an IBM XT PC. These games were created by a company called Sierra On-Line. They were EGA (16 colors) with a text input parser, so you wrote what you wanted the characters to do. My whole family really enjoyed these games. And they had such an effect on me - honestly, I learned to read by playing with them - that from a very young age I made the decision to become a Sierra video game artist when I grew up. However, by the time I was in high school, Sierra had changed quite a bit, and had been acquired by a much larger company and they stopped playing such great games. Anyway. But anyway I was determined to study computer science and electronic art, which I did and I also learned a lot about Linux and decided that Linux would be much more wonderful if it were easier to use. So that became my new passion - making software that is easy to use.

Many designers use Macs. What about you, what do you think of the Adobe Design Suite? Do you use it?

Nope, I haven't used it since 2006. Fedora (and once in a while Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has been my main desktop environment for several years now. I also don't use any of Adobe's design tools. I use a variety of free and open source design applications to do my work.

What Fedora applications do you use to create your designs? What does each of them do?

Let me give you a summary!

• Inkscape - this is the most important app for me. Thanks to this program I was able to completely abandon MacOS and any other proprietary design software. It's a vector graphics program (like Adobe Illustrator, but much better), and I use it for everything from user interface mockups, to icon and logo design, to diagrams.
• Gimp - Gimp is a really very complete image processing program. It is similar to Adobe Photoshop. I use it for photo editing, but I also use it to split user interface screens - I use these parts in Inkscape to modify the layouts of these interfaces - and I use it for some other digital painting as well.
• MyPaint - MyPaint is something relatively new in the open source graphic design environment, but it really is a beautiful tool. It's a digital painting / sketch program that comes well-equipped with a ton of great brushes that, in many cases, offer a very close-to-natural-drawing feel. I like to use it to sketch concepts that will later take their final form as vectors using Inkscape.
• Scribus - Scribus is a publication layout program that is extremely useful for creating ready-to-print works.
• xournal - Xournal is a great tool for taking notes, and adding notes to PDF documents. I use it to make annotations when I am conducting research.
• PDF Mod - Another great tool for manipulating PDF files. It helps you merge different PDF files into a single page set, and you can also reorder the pages of a single PDF file.

There are tons of others, but I think these are a good package to start with! 🙂

If my friends or co-workers don't use Fedora for their design work, can I still collaborate with them?

Of course. I collaborate with designers who use Adobe tools, often MacOS-X users. All of Fedora's free software creative tools support open source file formats, and as far as I know, all proprietary design tools can open files in these formats - PNG, SVG, PDF, etc. .

The only file format that can be problematic is Flash files. The free software world does not yet have an editor that can open Flash source files. For once, I agree with Apple in the hope that Flash will fade as HTML5 and JavaScript-based frameworks become more widespread.

Do you have any advice to give future designers when using Fedora to create amazing interface designs?

I think my best advice would be to 'keep an open mind'. Almost everything you do with proprietary software tools on Mac or under Windows is possible with Fedora. Sometimes things might work a little differently than they were used to (yes GIMP, I mean you!), But all the functionality they need is there. In addition, they are going to realize that the communities around these design applications are truly extensive, and the amount of instructions, videos and other elements such as brushes and color palettes available in these applications is gigantic.

My second tip is - get to know the Fedora Design Suite. This is a special edition of Fedora that comes pre-installed to discover many free and open source design tools.

There is an annual conference called Free Graphics Meeting where the users of these open source creative tools and the developers who have created them meet for a couple of days, and talk about the designs or the work done with them, or about what the next step will be, or what new characteristics will have the future versions of these tools. It really is a very mobilizing event and the community is a perfect place to find out what new applications will appear, or to discover what kind of functionalities they will offer. If you still don't dare to come in person and see what this is all about, at least be familiar with the materials from these lectures (a large number of videos of several of the sessions held during the last of these lectures are available online ).

My final advice is never to be left with a question regarding the software, or not to ask for help to solve a problem that has overcome them. Please ask all you need! The Fedora community is extremely friendly and you will always meet many people willing to help. We have a Designer Team that Fedora uses to design everything related to our image, and in that team we are always exchanging tips, advice and ideas. They are more than welcome to chat with us, or ask us for some help.

Where do you get openly licensed items to use in your design work?

Here are three links to libraries that I use a lot, and whose content is completely open:

• Open Clip Art Library - a huge library of art under the public domain in SVG format. The quality is very varied, but there are great treasures there.
• CompFight - CompFight is a search engine that retrieves Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr.
• > Open Font Library - a site related to the Open Clip Art Library. OFL has a huge number of open license fonts. I also have some series of articles on my blog where I particularly highlight some open license fonts that I like to use.

Would you like to share with us any hidden treasures you have found in Fedora?

Ah, I have a great one in mind. My laptop model is a tablet type. Sometimes when I am taking notes in tablet mode, it is very awkward to rotate the lid and open it for keyboard / laptop use. Then I discovered this tool called CellWriter that has a text recognition function, so that I can write on the CellWriter panel and it automatically converts what I write into real text. It is a very nice tool that apparently many Linux users are unaware of!

Thanks Mo!

Excellent right? And very inspiring the experience of Mairin Duffy. 😀