Earlier this year, the Desura client (an online game store/content delivery platform that supports Windows, Linux and soon to be supporting MacOS which I reviewed on my cheesetalks subsite last year) was released as a Free Software project under the GPL named "Desurium". I had been keeping a vague eye on it with the expectation that I wouldn't have the time to commit anything particularly helpful to the project when I discovered that they were hoping to replace the trademarked Desura branding (which the official Desura maintained fork will use) with something more suited to the community driven Desurium project.

By the time I noticed this, another artist, shi, had already put together a little "Desubot" design that everybody liked the look of, and the community was looking for somebody to take that design and go through the tedious process of creating a range of icons and inserting the design into every image that previously had the Desura logo or name.

Rather than doing the bare minimum, I decided to have some fun with it and try to recreate some of the styles of the original Desura branded artwork, switching the placement of white and blue (the Desura logo is white, and often is accompanied by blue secondary text, and since the Desubot is blue, it made sense to accompany it with white). I also updated the Desubot design to cull down the number of extraneous nodes and made it symmetrical, and put together an Inkscape template with a number of variations as layers for easy editing in the future (you can find this stuff in the Desurium repo if you're interested).

When I'd finished, we realised that we were a little unclear on licencing terms, so I got in touch with shi and had a chat and we eventually settled on CC0. Interestingly, shi had written a blog post about how daunting licencing can be, and it was nice to see I'm not the only one who sometimes feels like my hands are bound or there are excessive hoops to jump through when all I want to do is Make Stuff.

Whilst I'll be moving on to work on other stuff for the moment, I'm hoping to come back and do some more stuff with Desurium/Desubot. I wouldn't mind making a code commit or two when I have time to get familiar with the codebase, and I think I'd be keen to have a go at trying to have a go at bringing the Desubot to life in 3D.

Want to know what else I'd been up to at the same time? Astronomusic, Cheesetalks, Other Stuff