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The best way to get a good idea, is to have many ideas. So if you “vision” a better way for GNOME Desktop of doing things, don’t hesitate to share it with the rest of us. The cool part is that you don’t need to know any programming.

If somebody fancys your brainstorm, he will just implemented it.

Requirements

1. An idea ;)

2. A Gnome-Live account

It isn’t mandatory but it would be quite helpful if you can actually design your proposal with an application like Gimp or Inkscape. People understand better when they see something.

Also don’t be limited to stay in current GNOME designs. You can create something extremely different that the current GNOME offers. In my opinion that would be even more helpful, than a small improvement on the existing designs.

However if you want to stay near to GNOME you can “steal” some from the ready widgets that other people have done, and work on the top of them. Everything you will need is on Gnome-Design-Team in Github:

https://github.com/gnome-design-team

Creating an Account

Just visit

https://live.gnome.org/

and you will see the login somewhere on the top right. Follow the instructions there. G-Live account will give you access to edit all pages (but there is an Access Control Lit -ACL) similar to Wikipedia. The framework is Moin-Moin, which isn’t very user-friendly and has a weird syntax ..but just go with the flow!

After you done with Account Setup you need to create your personal page. To be honest I don’t really remember where is the option to create your home page, but I think is on the drop down menu on the right. If not, it is in another very obvious place.

Your home page will be live.gnome.org/”your user name”, like my fancy page

https://live.gnome.org/AlexisDiavatis

Notice that every change you make in any page, after saving it will be visible at:

https://live.gnome.org/RecentChanges

So it isn’t really good idea to make any kind of testings. Moin-Moin has a preview button to check your edits.

Uploading your design

Now you have an account and a design mockup. The next step is to visit GnomeLive design section at:

https://live.gnome.org/Design/

Scrolling down you will see Resources Heading and inside there the Playground section:

https://live.gnome.org/Design/Playground

which is the perfect place to start. If you notice the links you will see that some of them are under Playground

example https://live.gnome.org/Design/Playground/TVMode

or under Proposals

example https://live.gnome.org/Design/Proposals/UnifyTabExperience

I guess (I am not sure about the difference!) you will need to create one new page in proposals.

Lets say you want to make

https://live.gnome.org/Design/Proposals/mySuperProposal

Go to that link and you will see an option to create a new page. Create your new page and describe what are you trying to achieve and what issues you’re trying to solve.

Notice for uploading an image you need first to save the page. Then an Upload Attachment button will be available on the right. Make sure that you will attach an image (keep it smaller than 2 MB), and not any other type of files like audio or video. You can also link images from another pages.

After you are done, save your page and go back to:

https://live.gnome.org/Design/Playground

Now you need to edit that page, and just add you link there. That was all!

If you have troubles with Moin-Moin syntax ( I am sure you will do) check on:

https://live.gnome.org/HelpOnEditing

https://live.gnome.org/HelpOnMoinWikiSyntax

These two links are always available when you are editing a page.

GNOME Live is a nice place that will make sure people will see and review your work. Brainstorm Spamming is more than welcome ;)