It is fair to say I am less than excited by the new Ubuntu artwork.
I saw the Karmic Koala artwork over the weekend and to say it was disappointing is an understatement. There had been a good build up to the new look and and I had hoped for at least a new gtk-engine or no more brown or just something? Instead there was a brown theme using the Murrine engine, and some port/brown window frames. I hope the artwork is polished before release (I am aware it is a beta, yes) as there are some very basic problems with the screenshots I have seen:
1. The titlebar text is not vertically aligned (it may, in fact, be aligned but the shadow is not accounted for therefore it looks offset).
2. The scrollbar x padding is uneven (this is petty, I know).
3. The system tray icons look fine in that controlled environment but in the wild lots of unaccounted for applications will use normal coloured icons, so it will look crap.
4. The contrast on the window borders is harsh but on the GTK it is much softer, so they do not look as though they belong together.
5. The colours are insipid.
If this is the best ‘professional’ designers can come up with there is no hope for default Ubuntu ever looking anything above tolerable. The wallpapers seem at best uninspired and at worst confusing, but the icon theme looks OK if you like orange (does everything have to be orange, can’t we have some contrasting colours?). If we compare this to OSX or Windows 7 it is laughable.
The only positive thing I have to say about the theme is that at least they did not fall for the current zeitgeist of combining the menubar and title bar, which I concede looks nice, but as they behave in totally different ways, it is very confusing to a user, also as GTK does not support focused/unfocused windows (very well?) it is impossible to have the menubar change colour for focused and unfocused windows, so to keep the ‘blend’ both types of focus look annoyingly similar (example) or you break the blend and have a strange looking menubar on non-focused windows (see here). I have no idea why Suse went for it, other than aesthetics, as I said it does look nice.
All that said I’ll probably knock up an Openbox theme to match, because you got to keep up?
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