But I am being honest, when I say that I don't want to see "fan" designs in a calendar that is supposed to represent "canon" ships.
Since many of us contributors are trying to understand what you all want to see, generally,... what makes my Fed fighter any different from a "fan design"? Does placing it in a 'canon' (type) environment help ease the sometimes jarring effect of seeing something totally fresh, like
Clawhammer's entry? A lot of you have asked to see something new but is something new automatically non-canon?
I think "jarring effect of seeing something totally fresh" is an unfair characterization of what drives some of the resistance to "new" or "non-canon" designs. I think it stems more from the here-today-gone-tomorrow history of such designs, whether they've appeared in licensed products (the '70s Star Trek Technical Manual, the 1980 Spaceflight Chronology, various ships described in novels, etc.) or been purely fan-creations. We may see them once, but then never again. They're mayflies, with no history in the setting, and thus far no future.
This has been going on for nearly 40 years now, so (evidently) a lot of people have become hesitant to embracing neat new designs that haven't appeared "in canon"(i.e. on screen in a movie or series). In general, new and unusual views of established ships are preferred, since they won't drop out of existence the way all the other "new" designs have done.
That said, for me the highlights of the new calendar are the pictures by you, Clawhammer, and Koji Kumamura, which all feature "new" ships, so it's not absolute. It does add to it, though, when it's mixed with more familiar elements. Context almost always helps.
What I have in mind for my next year's entry involves a canon item in a never-been-seen setting which I am "designing", post production. Technically that would make it non-canon. Would that be acceptable if it were created by someone who did not work on the show? Would it only be acceptable because I did work on the show?
I do think you're a special case not simply because you worked on the show but because your work has had such a profound influence in establishing the entire "Starfleet look" from ST:The Motion Picture on. When it comes to the varying customer's notions of what looks "right" in something new in Star Trek, the odds are highly in your favor of getting a "hit" rather than a "miss".
Someone else stated the view that they didn't want to see "the Excelsior chasing the Enterprise from Spacedock, just from a different angle" (if not an exact quote, that's the gist of it). I'd agree with that only to the extent that the most dramatic view of that sequence was already captured in the film. There are plenty of other scenes where looking at it from a different perspective
does add something new to the experience (of which your proposed Dyson-sphere ground-level view of the Enterprise entering/rising is an excellent example). It's all about picking the shot.
