Call for participation: an ubuntu default theme lead by the community?

I like your idea but I also like the current orange block. So it’s a ± for me :smile:

At least for me, this looks nearly perfect. Very elegant. I liked horizontal line more but @c-lobrano has his reasons. In reality the grey bar would be a little bit thicker, right? Like in the highlight.
So when clicked this happens: vertical orange line appears + text gets bold + text gets black + grey highlight-color stays + (maybe this should be added: symbol gets as black as the bold text). I really like it. Thank you for the mockup! Glad i could make my suggestion clear and that it could be refined.
@pojntfx did add the idea to his mockups too. Very nice! :+1: And yes, i like it transparent (Fig. 3).

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I have to admit this looks really good! :slight_smile:

Sooooooo
 Would you reopen the ticket on github?

@nusi
I did not have the impression that this design decision has been made. We’ve seen mockups which some agree with and some don’t.

@madsrh @c-lobrano @didrocks
It’s up to you to decide. Feel free to reopen it or let it stay closed.
:sunglasses:

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Vertical line looks better for me

@nusi As mentioned, it seems we miscommunicated :disappointed: I think we all understood perfectly what you meant. I believe the valid reason that was refered to earlier, was me saying that:


we discussed this earlier and tried a few things but landed on this pure orange. 
IMHO this is a won’t fix.

I know that it takes a long time to write a bug report (or writing this reply) when english isn’t your first language, so I understand why you felt a bit disappointed when it was closed so quickly, but ( and I can’t stress this enough) no offence was intended.

So, back to the issue again: I did actually suggest the Microsoft styled sidebar myself back in november '17.

There were many ideas that we considered but we landed on the current design.

sidebar

I really like some of the designs posted in this thread, but I like the current one better.
This is a sensitive topic - I know that. Reading the comments above, it’s clear that there are people in both camps - and that’s how it always will be. Valid points were raised both for and against.

What I’m saying here is that we did consider other options and we know that it’s a lot of orange, but we’ve decided (at least for now) to go with the orange bar.

If you feel differently @c-lobrano @godlyranchdressing @luxamman feel free to correct me.

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I like the orange dot concept (with the bright highlighting). That’s even nicer than the vertical bar because it would match the orange dots in the Ubuntu Dock (which indicate the opened favorite apps).

Honestly, I even think that all other options seem more subtle/professional than the one we seem to have gone with.

But funny that such a small detail can be so divisive.

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A definite highlighting is always better. Let’s not get users into a guessing game.

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But it has a different meaning. One is one of the (dozen? :smile:) opened application, the other is a selected line in a list.

That’s probably because there isn’t any “wrong” design among those proposed. Any of them could do fine it’s job.

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I agree the dot with highlight looks good equally the vertical line with highlight looks good.

The bright orange bar however does not :smile:

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I disagree. The vertical line looks more elegant and sleek and I really am attracted by its look but it has the big disadvantage over the orange block that it is very hard to track.
Keep in mind that this theme should also be usable for color blind or handicapped people. Elegance is not everything. That’s the reason for many adwaita decisions. So IMHO the communitheme is a great middle way (sorry for this translation 
 My German is too strong and my English is too weak) between elegance and usability.

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@frederik-f @c-lobrano I must agree in that the current solution is simply the most accessible one. While I prefer the looks of @CraigD’s suggestion, I guess that the current color is just the most 
 obvious one. Is there some automated tool for color checking/testing such things (contrast & color blindness)? In Webdev we can do such things with E2E testing, is it also possible in GTK themes? Could identify such issues a lot quicker then :wink:

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Thank you for your answer. Would you tell us the reasons that let to the decision to keep it how it is? I am all in for orange lines. Making the use of orange more stylish. But if the reason is really to make it usable for handicapped i will support this.
You won’t believe it but i found a place where i would even add orange.:grin: When you get asked for permission (by the shell?) you can enter your password but the frame in which you enter it is white. How about orange? (my first “mockup” ever!):

I really hope we could keep the use of orange more minimalistic.

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@nusi It looks good, but it should only be orange if the password has been typed in incorrectly, then it would make sense.

That being said, when you type the password incorrectly, there already is a warning below the text field saying “Sorry, that didn’t work. Please try again.”. It’s in red font already (at least in vanilla Adwaita).

maybe it should get red like the text when the password is wrong. But i understood what you mean. Here it is already orange too:

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Hello, everybody,
have you noticed how strange it looks when several dialog boxes are on top of each other?
I find it very confusing when the individual boxes cannot be separated.

I can’t see the picture

This is in TODO.
Gnome-shell-communitheme is (unfortunately) quite behind respect gtk-communitheme. So if anybody wants to help
 :wink:

Hi,

I updated the picture. Hope it’s now uploaded.

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I like the non-subtle orange block
 but then, I’m a “brand fanboy” and would paint my face orange, given half the chance :stuck_out_tongue: I think a lot of the mockups shown above (including the vertical orange line) would be fine - it’s just a case of picking one, and none will please everyone. If one is more accessible, then sure, go for that.

Apologies for wall of text, but I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days thinking about Communitheme, and my hopes/fears for the finished version. I wonder if it might (to my eye) fall between two stools, in terms of visual design.

I recognise that Unity 8 looked great. The darkness of the panels made the different colours of the wallpaper, icons and accents feel really “luminous”. Ubuntu 17.10 was also really nice - but in a completely different way. The transparent panels looked really fresh and airy.

So I do like both, but in different ways, and am not sure a mix-and-match approach works. In the current implementation, the dark top bar makes the launcher look too
 insubstantial, IMO? At the same time, the lighter transparencies of the launcher and wallpaper make the dark top bar feel too heavy. They don’t flatter each other.

So I think Communitheme stands at a crossroads, and either way would be great if done well - but a mixture of elements from both is in danger of being less than the sum of its parts.

You could go for a “luminous” look that contrasts darkness with colour and has a similar appeal to Unity 8. But I think you really have to commit to that, if you want it to shine. Top panel and launcher should be a dark, dramatic team.

In this model, I’d go with lighter drop shadows to stop dark panels seeming “blurry” at the edges. If you were printing a dark stripe on some paper, you’d want the stripe to be nice and dark, and you’d want the edges to be really crisp. Otherwise, it looks unprofessional - like you printed it at home. In the current implementation of the top panel, I think grey bar/dark shadow play a trick on my eyes, and make me see faded, blurry black. But maybe that’s unique to me?

I’d also consider speaking to the default wallpaper people, to move away from faint transparent mascots - if this is a road Communitheme wants to take. Otherwise, it’s like a delicate watercolour in a dark, industrial-looking frame. Artful Aardvark and the current top bar aren’t quite a match made in heaven, IMHO (I note that Bionic Beaver is also drawn in light transparencies).

So, taking all that together, you would end up with something like (quick mock-up - I know it’s not quite right):

If you go for the “luminous” approach, I think you could probably bring back the orange launcher icon from Unity 8, and the different coloured accents (like the blue slider) will all work well :slight_smile:

Alternatively - another perfectly good road to take - you could continue with the “fresh air” feeling of 17.10.

In that approach, I’d keep the 17.10 top bar unchanged, to complement the transparencies of the launcher and wallpaper. I wouldn’t put drop shadows under nearly see-through panels, because crisp lines of division help when you have a subtle difference across a boundary. They make the panels look like panes of glass, which seems precise rather than vague. Also, leaving off the drop shadow gives some consistency between the panel edges and the “folds” in the default wallpaper, like so:

folds #1

folds #2

With 17.10, everything you saw when the desktop first appeared on-screen seemed to work nicely together. Folds, transparencies, panel edges, wallpaper. The immediate visual impact was quite strong, IMHO. Developing the “fresh air” feeling for Communitheme requires fewer shell changes (it’s more a case of not changing things from 17.10) and looks like:

A quick note on the icons. For 3rd party apps, all I’ve done is make a neutral Suru background. This is the Terminal icon with the following changes:

  • Remove the “>_” to make a plain squircle;
  • Set it to 50% opacity, so the squircle will adjust slightly to the colours around it.

Then I simply shrink the default icon to 38x38, and centre it on the squircle. I feel like this operation (or something like it) could be done automatically, for all the apps in the Software Centre, until masking is available in Gnome 3. And I think it looks pretty cool, too :slight_smile:

Anyway, I better wrap this up. I guess my hope is for Communitheme to pick one of these “looks” (Unity 8 versus 17.10) and do it well, rather than mixing elements from both. Otherwise, it’s like wearing a black bow tie with a leather jacket. Both are great items of clothing, but neither flatters the other as much as you’d like :slight_smile:

One last thing to add to this epic post
 I don’t know whether this is Communitheme doing it, or individual apps, but my Chromium and LibreOffice now have less wall-of-darkness at the top. LibreOffice has a pale menubar, and Chromium has pale (rather than dark) background for the tabs. And it looks so much better! These are two of my main apps, so my overall Ubuntu experience looks a lot better now :slight_smile:

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