Contributing to the Graphic Design of Fire

Most of the developers on the core development team are not artistically inclined, therefore we need the help of able Graphic Artists to contribute their work to Fire to give us the icons and images we need for the application and Fire Website.

This page should give you all the information you need get started.

The Fire Forums

The primary area for discussion of the graphical elements of Fire are the Fire Forums. The first step is to create an ID and join these forums to watch for requests and announce your ideas to the community. There are two discussion areas which are key areas for graphic artists and designers. The first one is Themes that deals with the development of icons and images for the application. The second one is Styles that deals with the development of CSS web styles to enable different ways to display messages in chat windows.

Read these forums for additional information on how to get started developing and submitting artwork and web styles for Fire.

Using Firebrand

In order to develop your own set of themes for Fire, you will need to use the Firebrand application. This application for bundling your work into a theme which can be used in Fire can be downloaded here

Here are some basic instructions for using Firebrand. If you have questions please ask them in the Forums.

1. Add Resources

   When you start the application, the first thing you should do is to add your Resources into the bundle. These can be sounds, icons, and images in a wide number of formats. Go to the "Resources" tab in the Firebrand window, and click on the "Add..." button to add your items to this new theme.

2. Assign the Resources

   Once the resources are added, you can go to the appropriate tab to enable those resources to be used as Icons, Colors, Emoticons, and Sounds. On these tabs, select the appropriate resource you added in the first step. You will then be able to select which area of Fire these items should be assigned to.

3. Name your Theme

   The Info tab in Firebrand allows you to name your theme and give a brief description of what the theme contains. Once complete, select Save from the File menu to save your file to disk.

4. Submit your Theme

   cd [directory containing theme]

   Then you can create a zip file containing your new theme

   zip -r theme.zip [theme file]

   Where you replace theme file with the name of the file you created with FireBrand.