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hitsinsatry

New GNOME2 default theme proposal

Submitted by erikg on Fri, 2003-06-06 15:05. Gnome Art

Eugenia over at OSnews has published a proposal for a new default theme for GNOME2. This is a follow-up to a recent article
about GNOME2 where she says: "Gnome's default widget look is a very boring one, and maybe one of its weak points [...] most users stay with the defaults, so these should be attractive and make sense". I must say the proposed theme looks very, very nice, and I would really want to see this as the default GNOME theme.

Re: New GNOME2 default theme proposal

Submitted by thebrix on Sat, 2003-06-07 04:03.

Hurrah for "very boring" appearance!

I have 20 per cent vision in one eye, thanks to illness, and the proposed theme doesn't work for a number of reasons:

i. The selected radio button and check box are too contrived and have insufficient contrast with the button/box edge and background. (A big black blob, tick or cross is used for good reason - it has excellent contrast with the background). On a quick test, I can see the Ximian selections from 3 or 4 times further away than the proposed theme.

ii. People with my type of deficient sight tend to have problems with parallax (determining exactly how far away something is, or appears to be). Anything with bevelling and rounding confuses this depth determination - the fields and spin box are particularly problematic - and the default Gnome theme is perfect with clean, straight lines everywhere. (The Ximian theme is in between the two).

iii. Some text has been made smaller than the Ximian theme for no obvious reason.

iv. The relatively deep shading of the title bar, particularly the text, is not gaining anything (but see the next comment).

That said:

v. The subtlety of background shading in the proposed theme is good (the less there is the better).

vi. Ditto the tabs; is there really any reason to emphasise the foreground tab except by its change of shape?

I suspect there are many people like me who have some visual deficiency and need a strong, clear theme but whose eyesight is nowhere nearly bad enough to use the high contrast themes (which I find far too blatant), and would find the current tendency towards blending, bevelling, shading and rounding a step backwards.

(Whenever I use a Windows XP machine I immediately revert it to the Windows 2000 theme; I find the colourful theme unusable. Ditto the default Keramik theme in KDE).

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