wiki.ubuntu.com— Here is the gallery of proposed artwork for Edgy. Mark Shuttleworth's blog at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/48 has more details on the background.
Jul 25, 2006View in Crawl 4
Since all of the GUI elements in any Linux distro are completely customizable I see no reason to get excited about this. Some of them look ok but it's still just a GUI.
Man.. you know one thing that Microsoft and Apple do, is spend a lot of time generating various design concepts and having tests that allow feedback to drive the look. I am really saddened to see that there aren't more professional graphic artists involved in the themes in such a way that they can actually act as lead designers and perhaps through committee, provide style guides for artwork created.I am not hating, but the design in these samples are not great on several levels. Too much heavy use of effects. Effects should be subtle. Stacking bevels, on top of glows, on top of shadows, creates too many dimensions which end up taking away from what could otherwise be a dramatic design. What you are seeing in vista is an evolution of what apple started.There is a video of the MS lead designer discussing the themes they studied, including some of the current leader in the OS design space Apple, they studied the look and feel of luxury by investigating what people feel is sexy design. The likes of BMW, Mercedes, etc. The gloss look, and satin finishes are universal to what people percieve as "luxury" in design, or simply very high quality. These themes are largely from the manufacturing industry.
I really dislike the direction in which the Ubuntu artwork is going... Why all the gloss? That's an old trend, Mac did it like 10 years ago and since then has backed off a bit. The only really glossy parts of the GUI on Mac OS X is the menu bar, buttons, scroll bars and I think that's it. Ubuntu should really bring in something original, something unique or at least a bit different, so that Linux stands out in terms of graphics because like most thing catered for the programming audience, Linux looks pretty crappy (mind you the effects that compiz brings to the plate are amazing, the GTK themes still look bad though). I know that the brown/orange is a kind of theme for Ubuntu but it's not really a nice colour, and it appears that no one really likes it. A few people like the new Human icon theme and GTK theme but it's still not really appealing. Linux needs only a few things, though these things are major; Better software and driver support, games, and better graphics. Even Windows looks a bit better than Linux by default. I still haven't seen a Linux GUI setup that looked really cool (I'm talking about general graphics, not effects like compiz).
Personally, I dont like the orange/brown color scheme. And also, the new schemes have nothing special, just wild colors that dont even go with each other.
nixrJul 26, 2006
Since all of the GUI elements in any Linux distro are completely customizable I see no reason to get excited about this. Some of them look ok but it's still just a GUI.
eastshoresJul 26, 2006
Man.. you know one thing that Microsoft and Apple do, is spend a lot of time generating various design concepts and having tests that allow feedback to drive the look. I am really saddened to see that there aren't more professional graphic artists involved in the themes in such a way that they can actually act as lead designers and perhaps through committee, provide style guides for artwork created.I am not hating, but the design in these samples are not great on several levels. Too much heavy use of effects. Effects should be subtle. Stacking bevels, on top of glows, on top of shadows, creates too many dimensions which end up taking away from what could otherwise be a dramatic design. What you are seeing in vista is an evolution of what apple started.There is a video of the MS lead designer discussing the themes they studied, including some of the current leader in the OS design space Apple, they studied the look and feel of luxury by investigating what people feel is sexy design. The likes of BMW, Mercedes, etc. The gloss look, and satin finishes are universal to what people percieve as "luxury" in design, or simply very high quality. These themes are largely from the manufacturing industry.
returnofmalvJul 26, 2006
Some of the vector graphic art were probably created with Inkscape.
xilonJul 26, 2006
I really dislike the direction in which the Ubuntu artwork is going... Why all the gloss? That's an old trend, Mac did it like 10 years ago and since then has backed off a bit. The only really glossy parts of the GUI on Mac OS X is the menu bar, buttons, scroll bars and I think that's it. Ubuntu should really bring in something original, something unique or at least a bit different, so that Linux stands out in terms of graphics because like most thing catered for the programming audience, Linux looks pretty crappy (mind you the effects that compiz brings to the plate are amazing, the GTK themes still look bad though). I know that the brown/orange is a kind of theme for Ubuntu but it's not really a nice colour, and it appears that no one really likes it. A few people like the new Human icon theme and GTK theme but it's still not really appealing. Linux needs only a few things, though these things are major; Better software and driver support, games, and better graphics. Even Windows looks a bit better than Linux by default. I still haven't seen a Linux GUI setup that looked really cool (I'm talking about general graphics, not effects like compiz).
ubuntudemonJul 26, 2006
I submitted Mark's blog entry which links to the wiki page a couple of days earlier :<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/linux_unix/Mark_Shuttleworth_blogs_about_the_Artwork_progress_for_Edgy">http://digg.com/linux_unix/Mark_Shuttleworth_blogs_about_the_Artwork_progress_for_Edgy</a>So in a way this story is a duplicate.
kailash_nadhJul 26, 2006
Personally, I dont like the orange/brown color scheme. And also, the new schemes have nothing special, just wild colors that dont even go with each other.
hchaudh1Jul 26, 2006
"So dream a little about Xen for virtualisation, Xgl/AIGLX and other wonderful wobbly window bits, the goodness of Network Manager, a first flirt with multiarch support for true mixed 32-bit and 64-bit computing on AMD64, the interesting possibilities of the SMART package manager... and other pieces of infrastructure which have appeared tantalisingly on the horizon."-- <a class="user" href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2006-April/000064.html">https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2006-April/000064.html</a>
scooter12Jul 26, 2006
tab takes you to the next screen.
mydiggnameJul 27, 2006
What's with all the complaining? I *LIKE* shiny , glassy, and the brown. Its warm and soothing. Sheesh......just change it if its so awful.