kbps

Ever since my impa­tient and juve­nile decon­struc­tion of the new “light” GTK themes for Ubuntu Lucid, there’s been a lot of talk else­where, as well as some more clues about the new interface.

First came Mark Shuttleworth’s announce­ment on the rebrand­ing. Some­thing that seems to have been over­looked, most likely because of its ambigu­ous word­ing, is his men­tion of a new desk­top font:

We have com­mis­sioned a new font to be devel­oped both for the logo’s of Ubuntu and Canon­i­cal, and for use in the inter­face. The font will be called Ubuntu, and will be a mod­ern human­ist font that is opti­mised for screen legibility.

It sounds here like he’s only talk­ing about one font: the logo font we’ve already seen some of. But “for use in the inter­face”? Unless he’s talk­ing about hav­ing two vari­ants within the same fam­ily known as “Ubuntu,” it doesn’t seem that this logo font will trans­late well to menus and but­tons. Here’s hop­ing they’re devel­op­ing some­thing a lit­tle more pleas­ant than DejaVu Sans, whose bulk­i­ness has long been a cause for ire among Ubuntu users. And although I’ve always found it to be rather nice (pro­vided that it’s bumped down a size), I don’t doubt that the art­work team could come up with some­thing that exceeds it.

Maybe the most pos­i­tive thing to come out of Shuttleworth’s announce­ment is his expla­na­tion behind the logic of the two col­ors, orange and aubergine. These two col­ors, as well as some other visual cues, are the vocab­u­lary used to dis­tin­guish between the dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions and users of Ubuntu. It’s clear that a lot of thought went into this design vocab­u­lary, and, as many have said, the new web­site mockup and other mis­cel­lany, such as the CD case and con­cepts for sig­nage, are pretty much home runs for Canonical’s art team. It doesn’t approach per­fec­tion, by any means, but it’s far more than any of us prob­a­bly imag­ined to be pos­si­ble. For that they deserve enor­mous acclaim.

But­tons

Sadly, far too much of the con­ver­sa­tion around this redesign has been focused on the new default but­ton place­ment. It’s an inter­est­ing choice, one that I’m sure they wouldn’t make lightly, and it would be valu­able to have a dis­cus­sion about the mer­its of dif­fer­ent but­ton place­ments — a dis­cus­sion that con­sisted of some­thing other than “WAHHHHH MAC ZOMG BUTTON FAIL.” GNOMEr Ivanka Majic mer­ci­fully explained some of the rea­son­ing behind this deci­sion in a recent blog post, and there are valid argu­ments to be made for all kinds of dif­fer­ent approaches — in fact, in my opin­ion they’ve got it wrong. But it warmed my heart a lit­tle bit to read Mark Shuttleworth’s response to this bug report (as pointed out by Web Upd8):

The issue is not a bug, it’s a dif­fer­ence of opin­ion on what is the best result. We may change it, or we may hold it.

Fuck yes! You tell ’em, Mark. For as much com­plain­ing as I’ve done about the aes­thet­ics of this new desk­top theme, “usabil­ity” is much more a sci­ence (though still inex­act), and if you believe that these new but­ton loca­tions are more ratio­nal, and that peo­ple will ulti­mately ben­e­fit from them, then by all means, yes, do it. It’s that kind of (rel­a­tively) bold exper­i­men­tal­ism that makes me think they’ve got some balls after all.

And please, guys, please don’t ask for this to be made into another option. This same thing hap­pened when every­body started bitch­ing about Karmic’s new Notify-OSD behav­ior. Obvi­ously option-bloat presents sev­eral tech­ni­cal prob­lems, but it’s philo­soph­i­cally unsound, as well; it’s the easy way out. Here’s what Mark had to say on the matter:

In Ayatana, we’ll take an opin­ion­ated stance, and we’ll apply some com­mon prin­ci­ples to the design process, and we’ll live with the results.

I have no inter­est what­so­ever in mak­ing it pos­si­ble for any­body to have any envi­ron­ment they want — we already have that. I’m inter­ested in dri­ving for­wards to build a default out of the box expe­ri­ence which is as good as we can make it for the new, con­sumer user.

Mean­while, even a blog as impor­tant as Web Upd8 is plagued by this attitude:

But I’m putting my money on the fact that noth­ing will be done regard­ing this. Why? If Ubuntu copy the OS X theme, they must really like Apple, right? The secret announce­ment of the new theme that came in the last day of the UI freeze and all that was also some­thing very Apple-ish. Well then, just like Apple, they won’t lis­ten to what the users want and will do things their way. The only dif­fer­ence is Ubuntu was sup­posed to be open. But I really hope I’m wrong!

First, this rep­re­sents a grave mis­un­der­stand­ing of the word “open.” Sec­ond, “lis­ten­ing to what the users want” is impos­si­ble. Which users? On which issues? Whose wants are deter­mined in what way? This is not pro­duc­tive dis­cus­sion. Nor is this:

There is no par­tic­u­lar rea­son for mov­ing them to the left, it’s change for the sake of change

I can for­give some­one for not hav­ing read any of the ratio­nale behind the new but­ton place­ment, but to assume so hastily that it was an arbi­trary deci­sion is unfair and closed-minded.

There’s of course plenty more to be said, but I’ll wrap up here with two quotes, the first from Mark Shut­tle­worth:

Exper­i­ments are also not some­thing we should do lightly. The Ubuntu desk­top is some­thing I take very per­son­ally; I feel per­son­ally respon­si­ble for the pro­duc­tiv­ity and hap­pi­ness of every Ubuntu user, so when we bring new ideas and code to the desk­top I believe we should do every­thing we can to make sure of suc­cess first time round. We should not inflict bad ideas on our users just because we’re curi­ous or arro­gant or stub­born or proud.

And, finally, Máirín:

Some folks under­stand­ably believe art and design are stuffs enshrouded in a mys­te­ri­ous haze of incense smoke with­out much logic or rea­son involved. I get it. I’ve been there too, and I think it’s easy to feel that way – dis­cus­sions about art works some­times get a bad rep­u­ta­tion for being any­where from fussy, to bizarre, to com­pletely pointless.

You may find solace in the fact that there’s actu­ally plenty of log­i­cal prin­ci­ples and ele­ments and a vocab­u­lary for them that can be use to dis­cuss such works in a pro­duc­tive man­ner that doesn’t involve ‘invok­ing an embod­i­ment of emo­tive sym­bol­ism’ or sim­i­lar. I strongly rec­om­mend you explore some of this vocab­u­lary, as not only will it help you more effec­tively com­mu­ni­cate your cri­tique but read­ing through a brief sur­vey of basic design prin­ci­ples will prob­a­bly even help you explain why you feel a par­tic­u­lar way about an ele­ment of a work you’re critiquing.

Update: Read my take on the pre­view of Maverick’s new Light themes here.

Let’s start with the good.

The new logo, while not per­fect, is accept­ably good. Cer­tainly palat­able, with a stronger con­no­ta­tion that this is an oper­a­tion sys­tem to be taken seriously.

The new home­page is what con­veys Ubuntu’s new “brand” most effec­tively. It’s clear here that they are iden­ti­fy­ing them­selves with orange and pur­ple (although which orange and pur­ple isn’t con­sis­tent — more later). Yes, there’s some­thing generic about it, but in a way that’s famil­iar and fresh. For all the talk of “light­ness” with this new brand­ing, the home­page is what embod­ies it the most. Com­pare to their cur­rent home­page, which is bleak and dis­mal. The new one looks a bit like the Apple home­page, admit­tedly, but only because they both adhere to some cur­rent web design motifs. To say that it’s imi­tat­ing Apple’s home­page would be unfair.

Now, the bad. And there’s a lot of it.

What is your orange? Is it #ef5a29 (as it is on the home­page), #f37936 (as it is in the orange logo), or #e54b00 (as it is in the “spread ubuntu” logo)? And why is “spread” still in the old Ubuntu font? Of course, these color issues may have to do with hav­ing saved images with weird color pro­files. I can’t be sure. But get it together.

Ok. It gets worse.

Take a look at this abom­i­na­tion. I want you to really look at it. There’s a lot to con­sider. Let’s get started.

The but­tons. They’re on the left. This makes sense, actu­ally, since the sys­tem noti­fi­ca­tions being in the upper-right of the screen was a huge obsta­cle — why, I’m not exactly sure, since you can per­form clicks on any­thing under­neath a noti­fi­ca­tion bub­ble, but it was a seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion among Canonical’s Notify-OSD devel­op­ers. This solves that prob­lem — at the expense of forc­ing users to learn new behav­iors, maybe, but I don’t see it as such a seri­ous out­rage. In any case I’m not here to talk usabil­ity. (But where’s the menu button?)

Why the incon­sis­tency in the depth of the but­tons? The close but­ton is more spher­i­cal and glossier than the other two, even a bit translu­cent (since its high­light extends to its bot­tom side). And the but­tons are not evenly spaced — the min­i­mize but­ton is closer to the close but­ton than it is to the max­i­mize but­ton. This is espe­cially notice­able (and, in fact, lit­er­ally more pro­nounced, pixel-for-pixel) in the inac­tive win­dow. Are these just mock­ups?, or work­ing GTK themes?:

Not only that, but the ‘×’s appear to be dif­fer­ent, with the lines of the inac­tive × being oblique, and those of the active × being per­pen­dic­u­lar. And here’s another color for you: #e24912. Where’d that come from? Let’s take a closer look at it:

Why not make it orange? It’s a sickly red, and with the reflection/refraction of light takes on the appear­ance of a pimple.

The but­tons are also rest­ing in a lit­tle reser­voir. Because of its size, it cramps the but­tons against its edges. Two pix­els of padding would have done won­ders. The reser­voir also adds unnec­es­sary visual noise, some­thing you see a lot of in the more gar­ish themes from GNOME-Look. You almost feel as though they were absent the reser­voir at first, then decided that the but­tons had become uncom­fort­ably sim­i­lar to those of Mac OS X, and threw the reser­voir in there to solve that prob­lem. This is a trend among the new theme, actu­ally: the ad hoc method of solv­ing prob­lems the design­ers have created.

Let’s take a look at the title bar and menu bar.

There is more space between the title­bar text and the menubar text than there is between either line of text and its upper or lower edge. The rea­son for this is that most pre­vi­ous themes had a title­bar that was a dif­fer­ent color than the menu bar; so what you’re see­ing would actu­ally be an appro­pri­ate amount of space, if there were a vis­i­ble dis­tinc­tion between the two bars. Since the text from both bars now occu­pies the same visual area, this cre­ates a huge prob­lem. The title­bar text, espe­cially, feels crammed up against the top of the win­dow. Even sim­ply reduc­ing the padding at the top of the menubar would help alle­vi­ate this prob­lem; but again, that’s the wrong approach. Encoun­ter­ing a prob­lem like this means that it needs to be solved at a more fun­da­men­tal level. Espe­cially when it comes to the default theme of your OS.

And while we’re look­ing here it’s a good time to talk about the harsh gra­di­ent that’s put at the top of these win­dows. This indi­cates a strong curve away from the user. Why? For what? For some depth, surely, but there are more sub­tle ways to achieve depth with­out mak­ing your win­dows appear to be half a cen­time­ter thick. They want this to feel “light,” and yet are cre­at­ing the illu­sion of bulky molded plas­tic. It’s a lam­en­ta­ble acqui­es­cence that only adds to the visual noise already begun by the but­ton reservoir.

Let’s move down to the bread­crumb but­tons in Nautilus:

Where is the source of light here? The “back” but­ton is lit from the left, but the folder but­ton is lit from above? And the dis­tinc­tion between pressed and not pressed is barely pronounced.

Alright. Let’s back up again.

Okay, what? The wall­pa­per? Here it is in full as taken from the home­page Web Upd8 (thanks):

What are we look­ing at? Okay, it’s some abstract blobs with some lens flare. Some have com­pared it to vomit, and the rea­son is obvi­ous: that unnec­es­sary after­thought of a salmon high­light in the upper-right. Again, they were work­ing with a wall­pa­per, and decided, “Shit, y’know what? We should put some orange in there.” Gra­di­ent, boom, done. And, again — looks like a throb­bing pim­ple. No con­cern for color har­mony what­so­ever. And, yes: abstract pur­ple gra­di­ents are going to get you OS X com­par­isons. It’s deserved.

The icon­set stays at Human­ity, which is sud­denly com­pletely out of step with the rest of the entire desk­top. At least the tooltips are pretty nicely done.

Obvi­ously, yes, I’m mostly com­plain­ing about no more than sev­eral pix­els and degrees of hue here. But this is what design is. What I really hope this new theme demon­strates is this: brown was not the prob­lem. It was its exe­cu­tion that pissed every­body off. Brown/yellow/orange/crimson is a beau­ti­ful color scheme from which to work, and Canonical’s design team could have turned it into some­thing that blew every­one away. I hope that this new direc­tion wasn’t a reac­tion to those per­sis­tent, unin­formed com­plaints over the years, but I imag­ine it may have been. There’s prob­a­bly more to be said, but I’ll stop here.

Read more reac­tions to this change:

• Troy Sobotka
• Ubuntu UK Podcast
• Ubuntu Fridge
• Ubuntu blogspot
• Shane Fagan
• It’s free.
• Matthew Helmke
• OMG! Ubuntu!
• popey.com
• Web Upd8
• Jono Bacon
• Ars Tech­nica