[ubuntu-art] Idea regarding themes

[Matthew Nuzum]

On 6/19/06, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org> wrote:
> You know what would be sweet... Illustrator has that new-ish feature
> where you can genereate an artwork template and then have it create
> variations of the artwork based on a database...
>
> What would be cool is to create the artwork in such a way that you
> could then create a make file and then feed in a color pallette and
> have it generate/regerate the artwork for each distro based on the
> colors in the pallette.
>
> make ubuntu
> make edubuntu
> make xubuntu
> make kubuntu

I gave it a try by making an icon in Inkscape and using an
alpha-transparent png; from a technical perspective, this is possible.

It took longer than I had expected so I don't have a formal proof of
concept to show, but if people think this is interesting I will
complete my test and make something that can be experimented with by
others.

The cool thing about using SVG is that it is very easy to replace
colors. I simply did a "find and replace" but a more elegant and
possibly reliable solution would be to transform it using XSL which is
quite easy.

I'll admit that in the real world this may not be practical because it
is non-trivial to do more than replace exact colors. Does anyone see
this as being useful?
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org