I resigned from being art coordinator of Sabayon yesterday (see previous post), and people have been asking what I’m going to do now. It’s pretty flattering how people have taken an interest and especially in such a short time. The quick answer? I don’t know. I’ll take a break for a week or two to relax and weigh my options. Here are a few of the ones that have presented themselves already.

First off, for the people from Sabayon reading this specifically, Fabio came to me almost immediately after I posted my resignation up, and he’s trying to convince me to stay. Our last conversation left off with him saying he had more to tell me and to “think about it” with one of those winking emoticons. But see, here’s the thing. Christopher Villareal was basically the guy I worked with and talked to on the Sabayon team. Fabio was gone for a long time and so Christopher was involved in the design process of what was a possibility to be a radical new theme for Sabayon, because he and I felt that the market for “the mac background with Vista panels” was already very saturated (and cliche) and thus would kind of doom Sabayon to never surpass the somewhat lackluster levels of success that the other distributions have had. When Fabio came back though, he gave vetoed our movement to be different and said that he wanted more floral backgrounds or a Mac background. To be fair, now he’s saying that he never said he didn’t like the vision Chris and I had, so there’s a little bit of murkiness yet, but I’m pretty sure that Fabio is in favor of sticking to the conservative, utilitarian look of that’s been popular among so many distributions rather than exploring contemporary design theories to try to radically stand out and attract a new demographic, and so if my only boss (which would be Fabio) didn’t actually like my hopes for Sabayon, than, well, you see the issue. So that’s what’s going on there.

A second possibility would be to go work for another distribution. One of my friends has actually been talking to me about starting one up with me, but until now I’ve been with Sabayon. I’m not sure if he’s still thinking about doing that though. Along the same lines, it’s possible that another distribution will approach me or something.

Another possibility is more close to home. One of the guys I’m going to be graduating with from my design academy this year heard that I’m resigning from Sabayon, and he immediately came to me and said, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about starting a design firm, and I was wondering if you wanted to partner up!” He’s a good designer, and I’d actually be making some money, so it’s tempting. I’ve tentatively agreed to explore the possibility with him, so I’ll let him sweet talk me while I weigh my options.

A fourth idea, proposed to me by Christopher, would be to make a site where I’d basically sell/give my services to the open source community. That could be cool.

There are a few other directions I suppose, but people are only starting to approach me with ideas. So we’ll see.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 3:01 pm and is filed under All Entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.