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title: Welcome Outreachy Applicants!

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# Welcome Outreachy Applicants!

Internship applicants interested in the **"Create and Design Icons for a Chat System"** project, you are in the right place :)

To get started, we suggest you work on design sketches for one of the chat icon tickets in our ticket system (GitLab.) We have **[an epic in our ticket system](https://gitlab.com/groups/fedora/design/-/epics/20)** with some documentation and guidelines for creating these design, plus a list of all of the open icon tickets. Please take a look at the list of tickets and figure out which icon you want to start working on in that epic:

**[Chat Icon Epic](https://gitlab.com/groups/fedora/design/-/epics/20)**

The project description and notes on getting started with the Fedora Design Outreachy internship are available here; we suggest you review that as well as you get started:

**[Outreachy Project Description: "Create and Design Icons for a Chat System"](https://www.outreachy.org/outreachy-december-2022-internship-round/communities/fedora/#create-and-design-icons-for-a-chat-system)**

Madeline and Máirín did a video meeting review of some submissions with a lot of advice that you might find helpful in working on your own issue - you can view the video recording here:
https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/w/14PZZTwdb4oxwLK4ERhFCB

## What makes a good contribution / strong application to this project?

We are looking for the following things:

1. **Evidence of research and understanding of chat room/space, team, and/or project your icon design is for.** Did you look up the team's website using a search engine? Did you read a Fedora Magazine article on the project? Did you talk to anybody on the team about their work? Could you accurately explain what the point of the chat room is, or what the team that uses it does?

2. **A statement explaining your concept and its relationship to the chat room/space it is meant for.** What are the various elements in your design? What do they symbolize? Why did you choose the composition of elements that you did? How does this all relate to the purpose of the team/project(s) using the chat room / space?

3. **Understanding/familiarity and adherence to the project requirements.** [There is visual documentation and written guidelines and templates for this project](https://gitlab.com/groups/fedora/design/-/epics/20) and the strongest designs will clearly be informed by these guidelines and specifications. 

4. **Sketches to illustrate your concept - even better if presented in context.** We are looking for sketches - they can be pencil sketches, digital sketches, or digital mockups using a vector tool to be able to visualize and evaluate the effectiveness of your design. Note that all of the potential tasks that are part of this project are icons for chat rooms and chat spaces. When we evaluate your design work, we have to think about whether or not the format/scale/composition/level of detail are appropriate for the context of being a chat room icon. The best submissions will be mocked up inside the chat client to show your design in-situ and in the final context it would be displayed in, to show you've put thought into how the icon will show up in the chat system and tested it out for effectiveness.

## Frequently-Asked Questions

### 1. What are some good tips for creating a good icon sketch for this project?

There's a few things we've noticed across many reviews of submitted work, and reading through this tips can help you push your submissions and make them stronger:

- **Please read through the chat icon visual guides and keep them open and visible as you create your designs.** They have important points in terms of the style of the artwork, specifications (round or rounded square shape, design must work one-color, color palette), and even a template. The guidelines are available here: https://gitlab.com/groups/fedora/design/-/epics/20

- **Be careful when using the Fedora logo in your designs.** The Fedora logo can not be broken down into its separate components (the "F" mark and the bubble around it.) It has to stay intact & whole due to the trademark use guidelines. The logo can also not be modified or changed substantially - for instance, the "f" can not be rendered using other shapes or using another objects. While ideas like this are creative, they aren't allowed under the trademark usage guidelines. You can read more about the Fedora logo and how to use it [in our brand book](https://gitlab.com/fedora/design/team/logos/logo-meta/-/issues/2).

- **Avoid using or relying on words or letters in the icon designs.**  At icon sizes, any letters in the design likely will not be readable or legible so it is best to avoid using letters/words in the icons. The success of the design relies on the clarity of the symbolism of the visual / concept.

- **Make sure your design will work at small sizes.**  Be conscious of the final size the icons will be displayed at. If you have a lot of elements and detail in your design, it will probably not read at icon sizes. Assess how complicated your design is and simplify, simplify, simplify. Some ideas on how to do that: reduce the number of elements, reduce the complexity of lines and shapes, drop any elements that aren't necessary for the icon's meaning and symbolism to be ligible. This is to ensure the design will be legible at icon sizes. The balance you have to strike is between having a mark that is readable at icons sizes, but also is understandable conceptually so your audience can easily understand the icon's meaning.

- **Research the team / project your icon is for.** Sometimes a team or a project that your icon is meant for already has some symbols or a logo that you can and should incorporate into your design. For example, Fedora Magazine has a forked bookmark design in its logo - this is something that could be incorporated into the design for the Fedora Magazine channel icon.

- **Submit your work with written statements of the concept.** Sometimes it's not always clear in a rough sketch what the meaning of each item you've drawn is, and it can be easier to provide you feedback if you tell us up front which channel/space your design is for. So please write a short (1 sentence is fine) statement listing the important elements / symbols in your design and how they relate to the channel or space the design is for. (For example: "This icon is for the Fedora Design channel; it has a paint bucket with paint spilling over the sides with a Fedora logo on the bucket, and it symbolizes painting which is an artistic craft similar to the types of things Fedora designers do.")

- **Make sure the composition of your design will work with the final shape/size of the icon.** Chat room / channel icons are circles, and space rooms are rounded squares. Make sure the composition of your design maximizes the usage of space within its final shape - whether that be a circle or a rounded square - to make sure your design will be as readable and legible as possible. 

### 2. Where do we share our work?

Any work you do (sketches, planning, ideas, designs) should be uploaded to the ticket for the icon design it belongs to. So for example, if you do a sketch for the Fedora Podcast chat room, that sketch should be uploaded to the Fedora Podcast ticket.

It is also a good idea, if you have a big update on a ticket or multiple tickets, to post a link to the tickets you are working on to the Fedora Design chat channel so you can get feedback from others to help iterate and improve on your work.

Please document your work from the beginning to the end regardless of whether or not you're getting feedback. There's a lot of contributors, which WE LOVE (everything is looking so great so far) but it takes a sec to respond to everyone's work in the tickets. So as soon as you work on an issue and feel free to share your constructive criticism to other people's work as well.

### 3. What is the difference between a *chat space* and a *chat room*?

A **chat room** is a single virtual room on the chat server where there is a single list of people present in that room who can chat together, sending and receiving messages and media. **Chat rooms** show up in matrix.org chat clients as circular icons (see moreabout this in the next FAQ item.)

A **chat space** or **space** is a grouping of multiple **chat rooms**, typically rooms that are related in some way in terms of their topic, category, or other aspects. The Matrix.org project defines spaces as ["Spaces are a collections of rooms. [For example,] #community:matrix.org is the official matrix community space containing rooms managed by the core Matrix team."](https://matrix.org/faq/) **Spaces** show up with rounded square icons in matrix.org chat client. 

For an even more detailed background on **spaces**, you can read [the Matrix.org blog post from when spaces originally came out as a feature](https://matrix.org/blog/2021/05/17/the-matrix-space-beta).

In the Fedora Project, the project in which this internship position is based, we are trying to reorganize and recategorize our **chat rooms** into better-organized **spaces**. You can read more about that effort [on this Fedora Discussions post](https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/matrix-channel-reorganization-ideas/41166) - this conversation was the origin of the idea for this internship project :)

### 4. How do *chat spaces* and *chat rooms* appear differently in matrix.org chat clients such as Element?

![screenshot of the element UI](https://i.imgur.com/0WjnanH.png)

Here is a screenshot of how Element looks like on my computer. You can see three icons in the far left - an M, and ChRIS brain icon, and a Fedora chat icon. Each of these three icons has a rounded square shape. These are **chat spaces**.

In the second column, you can see a bunch of circular icons both across the top of the column and running down its left side. These are **chat rooms**, and we can tell because their icons are circles.

### 5. How do we know which category the **chat room** icon we're working on falls under?

If you scroll to the bottom of [the epic for this project](https://gitlab.com/groups/fedora/design/-/epics/20), you'll find a list of the channels broken out into space categories here:

[List of chat rooms broken down by category](https://gitlab.com/groups/fedora/design/-/epics/20#note_1130425176)

### 6. I don´t understand what the team / channel / chat room / space is about that I'm designing an icon for. How do I learn more?

For any terms you dont understand, if you do a duckduckgo.com or google.com search for "fedora" plus that term (eg "fedora release engineering" or "fedora internationalization" - look for results from fedoraproject.org, fedoramagazine.com, docs.fedoraproject.org, etc. for good references. Different teams have pages in different places

You can also join the channels - they are all on the chat.fedoraproject.org server - and check them out and ask questions to learn more about the group.

### 7. How do I find the chat room I am designing an icon for?

In Element chat, look for the search bar or hit Ctrl+K:

![](https://i.imgur.com/By7UlbW.png)

A chat room search box will appear. Search for a term in the chat room's name. In this case we search for "Radio" to find the Fedora Amateur Radio / Ham channel.

![](https://i.imgur.com/B6mrjQq.png)

### 8. How do I upload my designs to the ticket? I'm having issues.

GitLab has an area on the screen that prompts you to drag or upload designs:

![](https://i.imgur.com/n02izYn.png)

Unfortunately, we've discovered a permissions issue with the way our GitLab is configured, so this will not work for your accounts. For now, please attach your design work to a comment on the ticket the work is for.