On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 00:17 +0200, Steve Dodier wrote: > Hello and welcome on the list, > > Feel free to show us your work, to design a specification for your > "work" theme idea, and even to work on it. Having a visually neutral > is, I agree, something extremely important. In fact, most of Ubuntu > installs I see just stay with the default theme, because not everyone > tweaks his PC a lot. That's why we also need the default theme to be > "forgetable", while still clearly representing Ubuntu, and, obviously, > not ugly :) That's a challenge for sure, but actual good themes are > not the fancy and glossy ones, but often, the well-thought and > polished ones. I'm looking forward to see what you have worked on and > what you will work on, Alex.
What I was thinking of is something less ambiguous than "neutral" or "forgetable". Aside from a few minor gripes I have with it, the default theme does a very good job of staying out of the way. However, it represents "ubuntu" as a company, as a representatives of open source, and, maybe, as a constellation of humanistic principles. This is fine if you're a user and like brown, but less so if you are a company. What a professional (or his boss ;) seeks in a UI is something that is functional but that also indicates (and promotes) "work". (I suppose that one of the reasons why macs are popular with designers and so on is because their interface, as well as their marketing, bespeaks of "fun" and "creativity".) By "work" I don't necessarily mean ugly, spartan or stark. Sure, the UI of Windows 2000, which is probably the paradigm of "work" is probably all of these things. To give one example: Nimbus, one of Sun's themes, has a slick, corporate feel to it. "Work" does not mean necessarily "workmanlike", but probably always means "formal". As such, the default ubuntu theme is probably "informal". I'm not sure if I can produce something to put under the rubric "work" as I have loosely defined it. (And, in any case, a lot of what I'm saying is speculative.) What I am currently working at is a retro theme, which by definition is eccentric and therefore informal, but it contains, nevertheless, some of the austerity I hope to work towards. A link for the curious: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Murrina +Dreadful?content=102434 Alex -- ubuntu-art mailing list ubuntu-art@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
