unity-design team mailing list archive

[Allan Caeg <allancaeg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ubuntu always had an earthy color scheme, one with brown and orange.
There have been a lot of discussions about this because many users have
violent reactions. However, it is difficult to veer away from the color
scheme because it defines Ubuntu very much and the rationale behind it
is reasonable. 

Perfectska04 has a famous GNOME theme suite. Probably, a lot of you are
familiar to it and are using it. He has a set of icon themes, GDM
themes, and gtk themes that have different color schemes. His latest
color scheme is the "Dust" variant. This scheme's look and feel is based
on the color of chocolate. Prior to that, he always had a "Human"
variant, which is orange. The Dust variant feels more earthy and looks
much more elegant. For some reason, I am much more comfortable with the
chocolate feel. Maybe because orange really feels cheaper. It has always
been associated with low end products and services while a dark shade of
brown, in my opinion, reminds the user of chocolate and leather. 

Shiki-Dust and GNOME-Dust fit the Ubuntu desktop very well because of
the look and feel that they create. It is earthy like the Human theme,
just more elegant, in my opinion. There may be some usability issues
because of the dark elements of the theme but the only known bug due to
its dark nature is a small color issue in Firefox which is fixed by
adding a user style mentioned in
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Shiki-Colors?content=86717 . 

Jaunty included Dust and New Wave as alternative themes. I believe that
Shiki is much more bug-free and elegant than most themes and it is in
very active development. In fact, OpenSuSE 11.2's default theme (Sonar)
is based on the green variant, GNOME-Wise, of the theme suite. I suggest
at least including the Dust variant of GNOME-Colors to the future
versions of Ubuntu as an alternative theme to Human, if not as a
default. I understand that it has a little different set of principles
from the Human icon theme as it includes application icons. This can
easily be fixed by not including those icons, though. 

I am sending this to the Ubuntu Artwork Theme and Ayatana discussion
because its an artwork issue that can be included in the 100 papercuts. 

Here is a link to the screenshot of my desktop with the GNOME-Dust
theme. http://g.imagehost.org/view/0082/Screenshot

Best Regards