Hey there, just before the year ends, an update on my part:
After setting up a new VM the Dock is still very transparent. IMO needs less transparency to feel like a solid Dock and work in every circumstance, with every wallpaper, and to be more clear.
For now, honestly, the blue is just present with the volume and this is not making sense entirely. There is no concept and the blue just breaks out from the orange only accents. Compressing / copy files in “Files” is when clicked on the progress clock presented by a green bar. Downloading in Firefox is also orange. So for now I’m still not convinced by a single blue bar. And for testing: the blue should fit the orange, like the base #1C6595 and lighter variations like #37759D and #5A92B6 and darker variations like #0E4E78 and #053C5F. Overall orange and blue are working fine together, it’s just confusing if the only visible blue in the whole system is the volume bar.
Yeah, I think this can work - let’s try it if you like! It is still orange, but less screaming for attention. If it is still too much, I also would go with just white/Unity 7 style. Maybe we need to take care of the possibility that with a round logo there is no square border/background and with a lot of open apps, the logo needs to be visually separated.
Also, the overlay on the button when clicked looks weird - is that a dock thing?
The actual window controls in communitheme works nice for me, maybe they can take more space for clicking and need a little adjusting. I also don’t see a white ring needed, this jumps out of style.
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Buttons
They still make me think because we are still not right there.
IMHO: We’re mixing styles and concepts a little.
First, what I like is:
Like said before, they maybe need a little more contrast/darker border, but they look nice, simple, and you know whats going on - like clickable, clicked and hover as a grey color. Non-clickable buttons appear flat, this is also fine with me.
Buttons on a dark background are very different, they need to work in the same way, but also needs to be different in style.
First the flat ones:
You see, the flat buttons are borderless, but on hover they having a border like none-flat buttons. I think, they only need to have a hover color, not changing the type of button from flat to a raised/hover button. Also for now it looks not that nice with the dark border. When clicked, the buttons get’s an inner-shadow and this is fine for me, it gives us a nice and easy visual feedback - maybe the inner-shadow could be less dark, but that’s it.
So: I would suggest getting rid of the hover border to stay flat until clicked.
Next, the raised/hover buttons on dark and breadcrumbs:
This is hard to find a styling line. Now it is more a mixture of buttons and concepts.
- The first thing you look at, is the less important - the non-clickable buttons. Also like said before, we should make the non-clickable darker and the clickable more bright to bring attention and meaning where it needs to be. Here we are misleading the focus.
- We have two kinds of feedbacks on clicked buttons - inner-shadow and the orange line. I guess when having the orange line, it is not necessary to give the button an inner-shadow. When having a lot of buttons like here, it immediately starts to look nervous and crowded, also because the “Home” button is elevated quite next to the lowered button. Let’s keep it simple and stylish.
We have that kind of buttons also in the software center/wallpaper and when having categories. So maybe let’s not think of them like typical buttons, but categories. Make them flat with a background, an orange line and a simple hover grey. So for now, just remove the inner-shadow for testing.
The other way is to make them flat (if the orange line is not fitting to the rest of the system) and just work with the background grey and maybe if needed, an inner-shadow.
The settings, lock & off buttons:
They follow the flat buttons now, like I like them to be. Maybe we can add a background grey to make them more noticeable, but at least the hover grey needs to be brighter.
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Some more:
- When in “Files” and change the view from grid to list, the list types/categories header font needs to be a little darker to be better readable
- Can we try to make the window header smaller to fit the rest of the system? Like in Firefox, the header is bigger and bolder than for example the top panel font.
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So, thanks to all who contribute and I wish you all a good start to the new year!
It’s gonna be a LTS year^^