I think this is said in every Krita submission here, but Krita's largest type of audience is cartoon-y fantasy artists. It makes sense for their demographic.
> but Krita's largest type of audience is cartoon-y fantasy artists. It makes sense for their demographic.
Yeah, that seems like survivor bias: the cartoony fantasy artists may be only ones tolerating it. So with this mascot they will select for such demographic.
I mean, that is fine if they want to keep it that way.
I am a happy user of Krita myself. I think it is a marvellous tool. However, I am not using it at work precisely because of the mascot and splash screen.
I feel Krita could be used my so many more people if they had a more neutral mascot.
Yes, an artist community take bikeshedding advice from a community with a skew from the tech industry. That always ends well.
>the cartoony fantasy artists may be only ones tolerating it. So with this mascot they will select for such demographic.
Sounds like a chicken and egg situation.
Regardless, it's a classic business question. When you become an established piece of software due to community efforts, do you try to become more mainstream at the cost of metaphorically betraying the very community that got you such visibility? History says thst it is the most profitable venture but a surefire way to become the very thing these open source initiatives strove to oppose. So it's not exactly a road I will personally champion (nor oppose per se. In some ways the founders do deserve such riches. And I'd probably take them myself on their shoes).
The only benefit here is that such a change has a chance to fork the project if there are enough unsatisfied customers. But forking can still get messy.
Westernized anime/"weeb" vibes, or "cute cartoon" vibes. People can like that stuff if they so desire, but it's a poor choice to brand your arguably in all other respects great software by something that niche.
Imagine working in a professional setting, and your boss asks you to see your most recent sketch on a design. You open your .kra file and that mascot pops up. Your boss sees the splash screen and asks himself "who have I just hired?".
I know the splash screen can be disabled (but only via a flag on the executable), defaults still matter. If the mascot was purely used on the website or announcements/blog posts, it really would be a different deal. Now it's packaged in such a way that it distracts from other workflow and gets in your face. Setting a flag on the executable is also finicky way of handling this preference, and it's prone to breaking after updates.
Speaking of branding and icons, the krita icon itself [1] is actually quite nice, and in my opinion seems to send the same vibes of cutesy anime much more vaguely by their choice of mostly using pink/pastel colors, but still doesn't make a statement in the same blunt way the mascot does. They could use their icon as branding on the splash screen and I would be very satisfied.
