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

[meetdilip]

This one looks great. Reverse the gradient, darker yellow on top please…

Mockups/new design discussions

Orange one looks nice too

[eaglers]

GTK and Shell dialogs are slightly different. Why not make them the same?

[frederik-f]

We discussed two different ideas when talking about this topic and also talking about menus and popups/popovers:

1. Make it visually easy to understand and obvious for the user when he is interacting with applications and when interacting with the shell, as the visual representation of the “system”/OS/DE

OR

2. Considering that our target audience is rather the “normal guy” and not the GNOME enthusiast, the urge to see a difference between the “system” and the application could be very little maybe even not existent. Thus, making a visual difference between dialogues of the shell and application dialogues would not be helpful. (The same could be said about the menus by the way. If you take OSX as an example, as far as I’ve investigated there is no visual difference between menus that pop out of the global menu or menus that pop out of anything else in an application.)

->2) is not anything evident or taken out of some data I do not have. It is just a feeling that could be totally wrong

So far from my side, I am still torn myself. Can’t really decide what’s more “correct”. As far as I know, GNOME designers prefer the difference, since the color of the shell is dark, and adwaita is white.

[eaglers]

GTK and Shell dialogs design in pure GNOME is nearly same:

[mr.tech]

what do you think with a suru bottom not so white and the original icon this combines the icon with a squircle mark without highlighting the background just making it uniform with the other icons

This format with the icons of third parties is what I do in my ubuntu installation and it looks very good, with gimp I did the same

remember this are just models with design flaws

[eaglers]

I also suggested such an idea, but it is difficult to implement, since the GNOME Shell can’t automatically insert icons into forms.

[c-lobrano]

Gnome has 2 different gtk dialogs, one is the “message dialog”, which is the one you reported, the other one is the “interactive dialog”

at some point we decided to use the same style for GTK dialogs and choose the latter.

[eaglers]

How does this relate to Shell dialogs?

[c-lobrano]

Because you said that in adwaita dialogs are similar in gtk and shell, while in gtk there are two different types of dialogs

[eaglers]

Shell uses dialogs similar to GTK’s MessageDialog. I said that a Shell dialogs in Yaru theme must also look like the GTK’s MessageDialog.

[c-lobrano]

GTK and Shell dialogs design in pure GNOME is nearly same:

C’mon it’s written just a few posts above.

I share @frederik-f 's point of view, I’m not sure what’s the best. I still prefer interactive dialogs buttons over message dialog ones, and in fact at some point we had the same on shell as well.
Font is a different story, it’s likely better to have the same style.
Might be interesting to ask gnome people the reason of these differences, if there are some

[mr.tech]

I would like to express the reason why it suggests the clear background for the icons of third parties and why it would be the correct option regardless of my tastes.

when Sam is asked for an icon for the ubuntu welcome
some members of the community designed a complete orange squircle with the circle of friends in the middle making the ubuntu logo go from being a circle to a squircle in its entirety, this violated the brand and in its search to make the icon without changing the identity of the ubuntu logo, Sam designed the following icon

if we look at the icon we identify the ubuntu logo in all its splendor, and we see the best solution for a third-party icon or brand in the suru style, this was an upstream decision and a very well designed design guideline where the icon or logo works like a pictogram on a clear vanilla squircle and it’s a wise choice from Sam

I can use the icon I want in my installation or I can create any icon that I want, but my comment goes in an objective and impartial way, expressing from my point what would be the best way to follow and it would be the clear vanilla squircle that was introduced in upstream
in the ubuntu welcome icon

[meetdilip]

Mockups/new design discussions

Full orange with horizontal fold looks much better than others

[Eskander]

what do you think with a suru bottom not so white and the original icon this combines the icon with a squircle mark without highlighting the background just making it uniform with the other icons

I also suggested such an idea, but it is difficult to implement, since the GNOME Shell can’t automatically insert icons into forms.

A little while back I did a small weekend project as a PoC that does just that. It inserts a white background automatically to all third party installed apps to get a uniform look in Ubuntu. Maybe Yaru theme could use something similar?

An old screenshot from my desktop:

[frederik-f]

Holy crap nice! Quiet late to the show but this looks interesting!!!

How exactly did you do that? Is that a dashtodock modification?

[c-lobrano]

Interesting, it would even be a little better if the squircle background can be checked according to the preminent icon color (like Unity did)

[Eskander]

It is basically a python script that checks /usr/share/icons/hicolor/*/apps for icons that are not already part of Yaru, then use an ImageMagick python library to generate new squircle icons under ~/.local/share/icons/. The script is called every time I install a new package from apt to ensure new icons get reshaped.
There are some limitations like ImageMagick not handling SVG icons correctly which cause a quality drop (another library is probably needed), also some apps (especially proprietary) don’t store icons in hicolor folder.

[Eskander]

I believe I can do that when I have some time.

Based on your suggestion, I extracted color palettes from the icons separately, and each time tried to apply a different color to the squircles. These are the results so far:

• Applying the primary color of the icons to the squircles:
  

  

• Using the secondary color:
  

  

• The tertiary:
  

  

The results are quite random with some icons looking better than the others each time. I don’t know how Unity used to do things but its clear this is not the right way. I appreciate any suggestions.

Here’s the link if anyone wants to experiment with the script too:
https://github.com/Eskander/surufy/tree/colored-squircles

[jaggers]

I vote for the squircles script!

EDIT: Tbh if @Eskander can incorporate a complementary background colour too then we don’t even need the Libre office icons.

[jaggers]

Great start @Eskander - how about picking the colour and then turning it into a pastel shade? Perhaps pick one of the values in the colour (the “white” if these were paints) and then set it to midway between the original value and maximum? Then refine the formula if the end result is too pale or still too dark and maybe bring other values like saturation into the process…

EDIT: Whatever script is used we can manually edit the ones where the colour isn’t great (or we can use the white script as a fallback and manually choose colours for key apps like Libre Office). It’s still a massive time-saver and great for consistency in the UI!