<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Dylan McCall <<a href="mailto:dylanmccall@gmail.com">dylanmccall@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote">Hi! The new fad in UI design is white space. Even though GNOME has very thick padding inside windows, we seem to be behind on this one :) A big problem with GNOME's look right now, and this seems to be the case no matter what theme one looks at, is the huge number of lines scattered about the screen. They are used to separate two blocks of content in menus, lists, toolbars and more. What I find is that we have ended up with these lines as almost the only tools at hand for separating content! Of particular interest to me is that these separators, functionally, have very little separation. They create a lot of visual noise, people interpret the lines as separators if they see them, but at the end of the day the two chunks of content are still squeezed closely together. At a glance, the separation is not really clear. Lots of new applications are moving away from the multitudes of lines, though. The new Palimpsest Disk Utility is a good, full example. It separates pieces of its UI through GtkAlignment widgets. This is done because the semantically appropriate GtkHSeparator is a horrible, ugly looking thing. So, let's fix that! As an experiment, I dug open Impression's gtkrc and tinkered with the width and height of GtkMenuItemSeparator and GtkHSeparator. This is all pretty straight-forward, though it also needs some theme engine work which I haven't tried yet. Unfortunately, the TreeView widget seems to do internal widgets like separators different than the menu widget does. I couldn't figure out how to theme that, so Nautilus's ugly separator (my inspiration!) remains unresolved. As a result of that and laziness, my pictures are mostly a reasonably attainable mockup, except the menus :) They can be seen at: <a href="http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/mockups/whitespace-not-lines/" target="_blank">http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/mockups/whitespace-not-lines/</a> I definitely don't think the mockups are perfect, or even particularly excellent. It may be worth some pondering, though. Bye, Dylan -- ubuntu-art mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-art@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-art@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art</a> </blockquote></div> <div>I never really even noticed all those lines, but now that you mention it, it does look kind of ugly. I say even get rid of the lines surrounding select boxes from the drop-down menus, as seen in your "<a href="http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/mockups/whitespace-not-lines/nautilus-menu.png">nautilus-menu.png</a>", just without the 1 pixel outlines on the boxes. Also, could you email me the widgets, I don't really know what your talking about with the GtkAlighn.</div>