Hey @didrocks, welcome back!
nice idea, +1 for that
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That doesn’t sound that crazy. If you file a bug in dash to dock upstream git repo, I’m even happy to add that option myself if it feels important in noticing running apps 
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On the topic of blue as the “activity indication” color, I’m not sure if this is the “let’s go wild” path Didrocks mentioned, but we could use all blue (and green and red). That is what I’m taking away from Unity8 and perhaps it lacks a bit of Ubuntu feeling (orange and brown 
), but it feels very clean to me.
Did you guys see all this work Alex Milazzo posted here?
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I like both orange and blue, but I think we need a “theory” or a “system” to define what should be blue and what should be orange, so that there’s some consistency.
Anyone has any ideas?
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Absolutely! @merlijn-sebrechts
With Unity8 as inspiration, I would think the following would be a good guideline: (a direct quote from @luxamman who, as always, has put this into a thousand words 
)
- Orange - on window close buttons, app indicator points, Ubuntu apps icons, app launcher icons… and everything that is related to Ubuntu as a branding (and maybe more points to bring more branding to the system in case we loose the Ubuntu feeling too much)
- Blue and blue gradations - indicators and selections for direct user interactions or focus - like volume slider, breadcrumbs underline in “Files”, folder/bookmark selection in “Files” as a border only like Suru, selections in “Settings” and so on, focus on elements like search input field in “files”, files selection frame with mouse, selected apps and folders, and more similar stuff… also maybe the “selected” color like we found in “Software Center” when selecting a few apps to delete which could be just a slight blue.
- Grey and gray gradations - like now as hover/underlayer for apps, files, buttons and so on. Also for right-click menus (maybe also try to use the blue border for selected stuff which is pure orange now if the Suru way is not working)…
And adding to that from this post:
- Gray for disabled elements (like toggles, comboboxes, textfields. …)
- Green for the ON toggle to give it a meaningful color.
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this definition is quite blurry to me. If the goal is to avoid being overwhelmed by orange, we can try move the color from the background to the borders only
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Agreed, let me try to dig up some design work done for Unity8 from the archive and I’ll post them here Could be a good reference.
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@merlijn-sebrechts & @didrocks - when will it back online/enabled?
Course, we will make nice progress in the next weeks and your feedback and help will be very welcome to improve the theme. We still trying some designs and had a long hangout yesterday.
For me the change from Unity to Gnome is a big step for a lot of people (working with 16.04. or even 14.04 now), but it should also be seen as an opportunity IMHO: If you have to get used to a new system like Gnome, then getting used to a new design in the habituation process is included and can be further improved from then on. Instead of having two habituation processes.
Little heavy with the pure orange but good to know there IS a way!
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The build farm back (in a limited capacity, so expect some delays), but you can find latest fresh builds already in the PPA!
Sure, both ways are valid Nothing is set in stone though, let’s see how this progress and how the team feel about it once closer to decision time (knowing that if it ships on the LTS by UI Freeze, no visual modifications is permitted after this and it will be the design for 5 years on that LTS version). If we try a more gradual approach, we can even ship it on the iso, just not set it by default (but available in Tweaks and adding the session package).
Anyway, let me restate I’m really thrilled with the progress and it’s even better than what I was expecting when going on holidays! Awesome team
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If we still want to use the Ubuntu logo as the app launcher icon, here’s a quick mockup of a few of the different possibilities. I tried to go with @luxamman idea of smaller icons and more padding.
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I like the one with the darker background; it differentiates itself not just by the icon, but also by the color of the dock itself. An app icon will never do this, so this makes it more clear that it’s not just an app.
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Just a white Ubuntu logo on the dock is very similar to how windows 10 does it, so it’s something people are used to. So I think this one is the best:
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I don’t like the ones with the line.
I’d also like to add that I don’t think this will cause confusion, regardless of what we choose. “OS icon” in the bottom left for “application menu” is a very common thing…
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I agree, the one with the darker background looks better for me.
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Yes, +1. One of the two white logos on darker background works for me.
I’ve filled a bug on github. @luxamman do you agree?
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yes, looks very nice!
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The dock will need to be more transparent if we want the app-view button’s darker background to be more noticeable. The difference is there right now but it’s close to invisible. Though, if we make the dock more transparent then the inner box-shadow will be more obvious and not look very good so should we remove that? I haven’t found a way (it might not be possible) to have the box-shadow appear only when the dash becomes opaque.
And I know everyone voted on the white, but I actually prefer the people holding hands in orange on white. With it in white and without a background it sort of looks incomplete, and the shape of the icon makes it seem slightly off-center. If we want it in monochrome I suggest we do it like Unity 7’s logo.
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Hey guys, so I know we talked about this but I don’t think we came to a decision. I’ve been experimenting and have been wondering if to just merge in some of these changes so we can judge and comment on what we like/don’t like/hate. I don’t think we’ll ever come to a decision unless we see everything in action.
Don’t be afraid to be honest.
Gray for selected sidebar row (taken from Suru):
Mixture of blue, gray and orange. The blue will be used for selected text, orange will be used for selected elements (stackswitcher button, selected menuitem, etc.). Gray will be used for selected rows (treeview and menuitems in context menus included):
Blue for everything (the stackswitcher looks horrible with blue imo):
Or, we can keep things as they are:
And maybe pull in some more gray (or more blue) to soften things up like selected rows if we need to.
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I’m missing the “all orange” option 
I’m not afraid to experiment and we should test things in the wild, but in the brief time I’ve spend with the current colors, the blue still feels out of place for me. Like this comment:
As @luxamman mentioned, on the colorwheel the opposite/complementary color to #e95420 isn’t the Unity8 blue. So maybe there’s yet another option here?
+1 for dialing back the orange a bit on selected rows