[ubuntu-art] Mark has Thrown Down the Gauntlet!

[Julian Oliver]

..on or around Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 04:57:39PM +0200 Kim Kahns wrote: 
> Am 24.07.2008 15:48:28 schrieb(en) Salane Ashcraft:
> > Ok well I posted them a while back, about a month ago. I am working 
> > on
> > creating a small team, and hopefully I can get some things done. i
> > almost think that we need to wait a bit for Icons - as what I have
> > been working on looks great with the current icons. Mark wants in 2
> > years for us to have moved to the point of surpassing OS X - So I
> > think we can create this theme, change the fonts, the work on icons
> > for the next release, while making improvements to theme in
> > preparation for the next LTS.
> > 
> 
> 
> Here is my opionion on the various topics:
> 1.
> Ubuntu will never look as polished as OSX, at least not with GTK 2.0 
> and brown/orange colors.
> Brown is seen by many people as old and unaesthetic, and orange is a 
> signal color.

when teaching with Ubuntu i make the point of asking students every once
in a while, who likes the look of Ubuntu and who doesn't? 

what i find firstly interesting is it is the brown of the theme that is
the most distinctive for them, rather than any other feature of the
Ubuntu desktop as it appears. in this sense Mark was certainly right:
the choice to use brown has made Ubuntu nothing short of distinctive.

where his theory for a brown desktop fails however is by very virtue of
the fact it generates such polarity of opinion. there are those of my
students that certainly /love/ the brown there are also those that
'distinctly' and very vocally don't like it, talking to excess about its
offences on their eyes.

to these ends the Human colour theory has failed: it would be far better
to have a theme where the colour doesn't produce such diametric
opinions. colour - i believe - should have far less prevalence in what
makes the Ubuntu desktop distinctive, let alone a success. 

put simply, colour should be used primarily to the ends of improving
usability in a desktop, not merely to make it 'distinct' (an empty and
vain project when taken on its own..). the desperate and abstract
attachment to brown is really starting to show it's age. this is
something people other than those of us on this list are perfectly
willing to admit..

we, the designers and/or art testers, haven't yet proven that brown was
any more than than as a thinly veiled attempt to be distinct within a
world of blue and brushed-metal desktops.

cheers,

-- 
julian oliver
http://julianoliver.com
http://selectparks.net
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