unity-design team mailing list archive

[Allan Caeg <allancaeg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

The distro logo is a logical requirement for a default desktop setup for
branding purposes (and maybe some others). Where should it be, how should it
be displayed, and how should it behave? For some reason, it is on
"Applications" <http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/1908/mockupj.png> on the
GNOME Main Menu applet and I have issues with it.

On Windows, the branding logo looks prominent and is on the bottom left, by
default. It's the button that opens the Start Menu and it had the word
"Start" on older versions. I'm fine with its current (Windows 7) look and
behavior, because the word "start" doesn't exactly represent what the menu
is. This button with the logo serves as the main menu of the whole operating
system.

On OS X, it is a little icon on the top left corner and it behaves like a
"System" menu, if I'm not mistaken. (I can't check because I'm not on a Mac
so correct me if I'm wrong). The logo represents the "Macintosh" and it
opens a menu of things that will control your Macintosh system. To open
applications or folders and do other things, the user has to click something
else. This makes sense, because other elements in the stock OS X desktop
obviously suffice for those non-system things.

The GNOME Main Menu works like the Windows Start Menu, but is split into
three. The branding logo comes with the prominently positioned Main Menu
applet (which makes sense), but it just happened to be stitched to the first
entry (which doesn't make sense). I was actually thinking about how GNOME
3.0 will fix the issue, but we don't have to wait for its release before we
resolve this.

How do we fix this? We can display the distro icon differently, move it
somewhere else, and make it behave differently. This will largely depend on
technical limitations. Right now, other than something like SLAB menu, a
quick fix that I can think of is to make the logo act as the "System" menu.
The order of menus will be *Distro logo* ("System"), Applications, and
Places. However, this can make the System menu too prominent based on the
F-shaped reading pattern. "Applications" and "Places" should be displayed
more prominently in the screen to avoid this potential issue. I recommend
exploring other solutions, though. Always remember that "Applications,"
"Places," and "System" don't necessarily need to be in one applet.

Moving forward, I also noticed that GNOME Shell doesn't have a placeholder
for the distro logo and I don't think it can be stitched to the "Activities"
button.

What can you suggest for now and for GNOME 3?

Best Regards,
Allan Caeg
http://live.gnome.org/AllanCaeg