[ubuntu-art] Styles/looks discussion

[Michiel Sikma]

On Aug 19, 2006, at 1:43 PM, Who wrote:

> Good idea to discuss this :)
>
> Personally, I was struggling to produce much that I liked with all out
> gloss, I think that matte/gloss will be much easier to produce work
> that is easy on the eyes and has a positive impact. Do people think
> failsafe is matte or all out gloss? We seem to have one style from the
> existing gdm and another from the splash...

Well, judging by the guidelines laid out by Frank, it is both. :) Or  
can be, anyway. But I feel that with the stuff that I personally have  
made that felt like it belonged to Failsafe, it's more of a Matte/ 
Gloss style than an all-out-gloss one. It just feels a lot better to  
me that way. Failsafe, as it has been retroactively named, was always  
a very sober and clean art direction, and I feel that Matte/Gloss  
continues that in a more elegant manner.

> In terms of designs, circles captivates me more than anything else,
> because I think we can push a bit of new into it - but it is also not
> as distinctive as it could be - with glossy circles we will need to be
> very careful not to step on the toes of Fedora Core 5 (which, while
> blue, was glossy/matte and circley)

I don't think we need to focus on not having to look like Fedora Core  
5, though. If anything we should just make neat art and not focus on  
whether we're stepping on anyone's toes. I can't really see Ubuntu  
ever taking the exact same artistic direction as Fedora, anyway.

I hope that we can look even better than Fedora Core 5's art with the  
next release, by the way. I feel that the Core 5 art is just a little  
more sophisticated than ours as it is right now. It looks very  
lightweight, something which works well with the icon style they're  
trying to convey. I feel that our 6.06 had a mostly unfinished and  
unpolished look. Like the drop-down menu in the GDM, which totally  
does not fit in, or the end session dialog that looks bloated and is  
off-center. I personally also reject the large red "knob"-like icon  
used to end the session. If we look at Tangerine or Fedora's icons,  
we see that they use a door instead, which is much more low-profile  
and does a better job at staying consistently less noticeable to be a  
bother.

I think that this release should, besides just making new and  
innovating art, also be to fix these inconsistencies and generally  
polish the entire thing up a bit, which is something Fedora Core 5 is  
ahead of, when compared to us.

> As for the colours: they are much less orage than we have been using
> (personally, a relief for me :P) - I don't know what implications this
> has for the GTK them or icon set - I think the key will be to add
> highlights in the other work that pick up on the icons - but I don't
> really know about this - if anyone has any more concrete ideas about
> how to make these other two look integrated....

I was actually kind of peeved to learn that Frank's color palettes  
were more brownish than what I had been doing with the GTK theme at  
that point. I had been implementing hints of red and even tiny  
touches of yellow into the palette with my latest versions, and think  
that it works really well at refreshening the look. But well, perhaps  
there's still room for such colors in the future anyhow.

I don't even know about the icon set anymore, to be honest. I've got  
quite a few things to say about icons in general, but feel that a  
discussion on that is totally out of place here (for reasons of space  
too...). But as long as I don't have sources for the Human icon set,  
I can't really suggest anything. Does anyone still have that link  
that contained it? I'm willing to do a lot for Ubuntu art, but  
reverse engineering the alpha channels of all icons of an icon set  
isn't one of them. :)

Michiel Sikma
michiel at thingmajig.org