Karmic Artwork

Sat Sep 12 17:12:26 UTC 2009

2009/9/12 Pasi Lallinaho <open at knome.fi>

> > Currently with the new gdm we have a gtk window in the middle of the
> > screen. I think the tree and birds could be used to encircle the
> > window and decorate the background without being too overcrowded. The
> > tree could be on the left, and we could make sure that for most screen
> > ratios / little-medium resolutions we would have a few birds above
> > (top & middle right) and on the right (right and top to middle) of the
> > window, flying in the same direction.
> This sounds good. We just have to see how we can accomplish this.

> > Recoloring will be needed for the icons that are everywhere. App
> > icons, categories, folders. I also want the Human notification icons
> > and some UNICOLOR media icons (strong preference for the Breathe ones
> > - Human ones are cool too). Also, we may want to do a few custom icons
> > (a media-dynamic icon for instance which is used by exaile), and maybe
> > some custom icons going with the theme for the apps we ship by default
> > (i'm saying that but i don't have an exemple).
> Can you write a short summary on the notification icons and UNICOLOR
> icons? Custom icons are plausible if there is good enough rationale for
> them.
>

Notification icons
ls -R /usr/share/icons/Human/scalable | grep notification, basically :P

As for the media icons
media-playlist-shuffle media-playlist-repeat media-playlist-dynamic (that
one doesnt exist in fd.o as far as I know but Exaile uses it, and i think
Banshee too), and the play/pause/stop/next/prev icons.

>
> > But we really don't need to recolor every single icon. Smooth yellow
> > isn't shocking at all in the midst of blue.
> Of course not. It will take some time anyway, and the first new color
> (hue) might not be what we wanted, so the effort might become bigger
> than we thought.

> My idea was the following : the current default theme has way too much
> > contrast and just hurt eyes with bright screens. And it is, sorry, NOT
> > APPEALING AT ALL. Alvaro is a great base theme. It has 2k downloads,
> > and some themes based on it too. It is performing very well in gtkperf
> > (at least here, feel free to send me benchmarks :p), and the gtkrc is
> > rather simple. I used it for several months and didn't notice any
> > glitch with the xubuntu apps. I think we can make two themes out of it :
> I wholeheartedly agree.
> >
> > a) Albatross, which would retain most of Alvaro and use my Alvaro
> > xfwm, and an unified and dark title bar, with a dark panel, and a
> > shiny blue as a selected_color. This would be our "dark based" theme
> > for Xubuntu. We dont ship OOo.org which sucks for dark themes, dark
> > themes fans will be happy and we will finally offer more than just the
> > XFCE themes and our own one.
> Alias "Blue Jay". We should however see if we can fix even some major
> bugs in OOo.org with the dark theme if possible.
>

OOo is broken. I don't know what toolkit they use but they have way too many
custom widgets, themed in a way too weird way. I don't wanna support that in
a theme.

> > b) Seagull (because bird names are funneh, and we will have birds in
> > our GDM) which would be a light theme, with light grey panels and a
> > bright title bar meant to look good with the Default xfwm's active and
> > inactive look. It would use a brighter blue and we would tweak it here
> > and there to look good with the smooth side of the Humanity icons. We
> > would be  going from a very contrasted gtk theme and icon theme to
> > something much smoother, which i believe is important when you use
> > your computer daily.
> Squeek!

> As I said above, some themes are just too sexy when the title bar and
> > xfwm theme are unified - while others look really good without
> > unifying these. The default Xubuntu theme should use the default xfwm,
> > because that one rocks and is part of our visual identity too. That
> > one can't have unified title bars, but it's really not a problem as
> > long as the title bar is not darker than the inactive xfwm window look.
> So, which one is meant to be the default (and have the default xfwm – or
> should both do)? Earlier I thought the dark theme would be the default
> (my strong preference). Sorry if I accent on this too much, but I would
> like the Alvaro xfwm to be optional.
>

I think the safest default is, for a11y and branding reasons, Light GTK +
default xfwm. But if we also keep a dark / half dark variant, then we need a
dark xfwm. The default one is light grey for inactive windows... This is why
I wanna pull the Alvaro xfwm.

> Something
> > like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlCVrtgxVcI&hl=en&fs=1&hd=1
> > <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlCVrtgxVcI&hl=en&fs=1&hd=1> rocks but
> > I don't think it's implementable. I'll try to grab some of Mat
> > Tomaszewski's time monday to talk about the limits of xsplash theming.
> > I think the pink iteration 6
> > in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Karmic/Boot has very nice
> > shapes, and that with a blue background could look just fine. We could
> > just replace the Ubuntu 9.10 + the logo above the slider by a single
> > XFCE mouse, of approximately 1.5 times the width of the logo, in the
> > middle, and add nothing else. Thoughts ?
> If it's possible (Mads' "4th") anyway, I might be able to pull a
> programmer for this job. I think we really could use the default Ubuntu
> theme recolored (as Lionel suggested) if anything else fails. It doesn't
> really look bad and this can become quite a big burden if we keep on
> insisting doing something else than Ubuntu does. It has already become
> quite hard to match what they are having, even without talking about
> surpassing.
>
> The mice might work well, but I think we would still want that the word
> "Xubuntu" would appear somewhere. Also, I don't know if it would be
> marketwise intelligent to not include the (X)ubuntu logo – even if we
> use Xfce and we love it, we are not Xfce. We are Xubuntu, which is kind
> of part of Ubuntu, so we can't dismiss the Ubuntu marketing completely.
> It is clear that the Xubuntu logo would not work as the Ubuntu logo
> (monochrome I mean; as the mouse is overlapping the circle), so what to
> do then? I don't know. Any other ideas?
>

The idea of the mouse is that the shape of the mouse fits better alongside
the slider than the shape of the Xubuntu logo. As for keeping the Xubuntu
word, we could put it below (probably not sexy) or in the bottom left /
right corner. Thoughts ?

-- 
Steve Dodier
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