unity-design team mailing list archive

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 6:26 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> Sam Hulick wrote on 18/02/14 23:57:
>>
>> From a design standpoint, I have to disagree with multi-color tabs.
>> For Ubuntu it would be a step backwards, IMO, in trying to achieve
>> a cleaner, more modern look, which I know is one of their goals
>> lately.
>
> It's a good exercise, whenever tempted to describe an interface as
> "clean" or "modern", to try being more specific. ("Modern" in
> particular is a kind of fallacious appeal to novelty.)
>
> One specific problem with multi-colored tabs is that they would
> often be the most colorful thing on the screen, while being one of the
> least important things on the screen.
>
>> My suggestion would be to thicken the borders and/or shadows
>> between tabs to make them more distinct. Or possibly dim all but
>> the selected tab. In your first screenshot, it's visually
>> difficult to tell at a glance what my current tab is. There needs
>> to be some way to call out that tab.
>
> This is "Difficult to distinguish which tab is selected"
> <http://launchpad.net/bugs/762349>. It's not a problem for Radiance,
> where inactive tabs are darker. I don't know how it could be fixed for
> Ambiance, where the active tab is already nearly black. Mockups welcome!

In the development version of Ambiance (running the latest 14.04 dev
version) the tabs are white and the active tab is nearly
indistinguishable even to my relatively good eyes. See, for example,
the screenshot in comment #14 of bug #762349. Simply darkening the
active tab (or adding an Ubuntu-orange highlight stripe or something)
is quite feasible and would alleviate much of the problem.

Evan