“Casual Ubuntu users may have registered surprise when they first booted the distribution’s Edgy Eft release this past October. Back at the beginning of the Edgy development cycle, much was made of the formation of a new, dedicated Art Team to develop a fresh look for the backgrounds and splash screens of the startup process. But when Edgy hit the shelves, the artwork was scarcely different from that of its predecessor, Dapper Drake.”
Off topic :
.. maybe I am the only one but could we please have links where one expects them ?
The question is “What hapened to the artwork .. ?”
None of the two linked words are a logical link to provide an answer .
Just IMO
Why not use a Gnome backround that matches Ubuntu’s colors like this:
http://art.gnome.org/backgrounds/gnome/1166
Outside of backgrounds, there is a bunch of non-distro-specific Gnome art that is available.
Outside of the Ubuntu logo, I don’t really see the point in taking on most other art as a seperate project.
Brand recognition? I know when I’m sitting in class, I recognize Ubuntu’s sounds and artwork from pretty far, just like OS X and Windows XP because they are pretty unique. Regardless of using Fedora and Gentoo and other Linux distros, I have a tendency of not recognizing those from the opposite site of the classroom because they didn’t build the same brand recognition. Unique colors and design are going to help build the Ubuntu brand name and make it more then just another Linux distro. And it seems as if its going to work out well, most other distros don’t even want to copy Ubuntu’s brown (I personally love it, especially in Edgy).
I’m always been surprised by the ubuntu stuff, love or hate it its very distinctive. I’m surprised if they can break out of that cycle.
As a side not I notice chocolate brown is the new season colour, I a much darker colour than Ubuntu iconic colouring. I personally look forward to the day a theme does not mean having to look at a lightbulb all day, so would appreciate a darker theme. I would say Vista’s almost black theme is stunning.
I know branding is important, but for a desktop. I think there are more benefits for it changing with the seasons to match whats on the street. Especially as this reinforces its 6 months release cycle as opposed to the 6 years imposed by Microsofts offerings.
“I think there are more benefits for it changing with the seasons to match whats on the street.”
The seasons in SA is different from those in Northern Europe, North America etc. What regional seasons should be used? Maybe they are already following the SA seasons?
Does anybody know if the artwork created by the team is available for installation? I am really curious what was their proposal and would be glad to install it as a theme in my Ubuntu Edgy.
The Ubuntu orange/brown scheme is horrific in my humble opinion. Others love it. Choice is always good. I for one always spend hours converting my boot splash, login backdrop and splash, icons, and themes to something more pleasing after a fresh install of Ubuntu. I wish that someone would create either a script, or a DEB meta-package that would allow people to very easily choose a blue theme, or perhaps other alternatives to the default.
I agree… I’d love to have an easy to install Blue Theme or a Brushed Metal one.
Just something simple, and NOT brown…
LOL!
Like installing the blubuntu-look package in edgy?
Looking at that wiki-page of the so called new ‘artwork’, I can understand why he decided against inclusion of it.
Putting 1 glossy layer on top of poo color tints isn’t what I would call ‘art’.
I hate to say this, but MS (heheheh, Mark Shuttleworth = MS, get it? heheh) would be better off if he’d hire actual artists.
Edited 2006-11-14 23:11
[Shuttleworth] would be better off if he’d hire actual artists.
Not saying it’s a bad idea, but he did that with Ubuntu’s first release. The result was the naked people.
http://www.communitymx.com/content/source/C5776/nude.jpg
Actually, after looking for, and finding some of that nudie artwork just now, I think I want it back.
Edited 2006-11-14 23:28
I looked at that link screenshot – this is artist’s work ?
IMO photographs of people is really not a good idea for a universal background – I don’t want to be looking at somebody else all the time .
I do rather like the second wallpaper idea on this one : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/EdgyProposals/WallpaperProp…
Certainly not finished but IMO potential to be really good – but only work in few colour themes .
Some of the sketches on the wiki look cute
– what could be done is that people exchange vector files & so work on changes .
Just IMO
BTW are there graphics apps which allow some kind of collaborative editing etc ?
EDIT : I have found this on sourceforge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ehizo/
EDIT : Project died : “This open source project died because it didn’t have a clear, concise vision. ”
Edited 2006-11-14 23:51
The second wallpaper does indeed show off way more what a true artist should be capable of.
But then, look at the rest of the page: swoosh here, swirl there, filter here, lensflare there and even some kind of Super Ubuntu Bros-wallpaper, which isn’t that bad, but what does it represent? Ubuntu users in the wild?
That’s more or less what I was talking about. There don’t seem to be many capable artists on the Ubuntu-project.
If you can’t combine colors, if you can’t create an image where filters are only used to enhance or complement an image, if you can’t even draw a stick-man, you cannot not call yourself a graphical artist.
” if you can’t even draw a stick-man, you cannot not call yourself a graphical artist.” …so you can call yourself a graphical artist??
> I hate to say this, but MS (heheheh, Mark Shuttleworth = MS, get it? heheh) would be better off if he’d hire actual artists.
As the original team coordinator for the “community” art team (we thought we were an official team at the time), I can tell you for sure that before the Edgy release the artists were hired and paid. If I didn’t know about the new “official” art team, I would have assumed the same was true for Edgy. I’m not one to automatically relate brown with “poo”, but after this many release I myself wish they’d at least start the color wheel spinning to differentiate the releases from each other a bit more.
Aaron
http://www.volvoguy.net/ubuntu
I think the theme teams that Stroep refers to is a great idea. He mentions that four shipped with Edgy – however they don’t seem to be included in the release that I can tell? (IOW, they’re not available under Themes, and I don’t see them in the repositories either.)
Come on, look a bit harder. they are in the packages blubuntu-look, peace-look and tropic-look.
ok, they’re there. I think they should have named them theme-artwork instead of something-look. Why would the average person think to search for “look” in Synaptic when the Ubuntu artwork packages are named “artwork” (which is what I searched for).
I doubt that “casual users” will notice that the artwork hasn’t changed much. “Casual users” don’t hang around in forums and update their systems using the latest unstable repositories.
And of corse Mark has a veto, after all he is the criminal mastermind behind Ubuntu. And of course he’ll make use of that veto if he isn’t satisfied with the results.
That said; the descision to scrap the Edgy Eft Artwork wasn’t made by Mark alone.
Nothing to see here, move along.
I think Ubuntu is doing a good job maintaining an original and warm design. But they made some giant mis-steps.
First off, the default wallpaper is always the worst one. Try to look at the alternatives. And they don’t use the Tango icon theme as a backup (or at least I haven’t noticed it). Instead they use the old, ugly Gnome icons.
And last point: The Thunderbird icon!? That’s so f*cking ugly. Thunderbird has a nice icon with a bird… Ubuntu trashed that in favour for something that looks like the envelope for a job resignation or a suicide note.
The article is honest and straight forward and I hope the Ubuntu Art Team will get to be the creators of the next theme. I see them working in a very thought-through process.
Brown is ugly but somehow tolerable. However, orange is what I absolutely despise. Orange, red and other aggressive colors have no place on the desktop meant for work. They distract and irritate, unlike blue, green and the like.
Frankly, I think there are other ways of brand differentiation besides colors (first that comes to my mind is shades of colors ;-)). I don’t understand why everybody thinks that being blue automatically makes you indistinguishable from Windows etc.
Actually, I quite like orange as primary desktop colour. My desktop features “FreshFlower” from the gnome-backgrounds package. I use “Tangerine” as icon theme and a modified version of the “Human” metacity-theme.
Don’t know what people have against warm colours.
I live in a tropical country and sometimes here is 40 C and using a brown, orange color sucks as hell.
I think that making whole desktop follow the shades of only one colour is a bad idea. Orange is not that bad if used right, for example for some time I had my desktop themed like this http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/7208/greenorangebb9.png and it didn’t get in my way at all.
Sorry but orange with green doesn’t look really well together…
It’s a matter of taste. IMO it’s better that orange with orange with orange
Bollocks. Girls with red hair and green eyes are absolutely extraordinarily beautiful
Shuttleworth has a quaint notion that color is democratic; i.e., all color schemes are equally valid and more importantly, equally valid between reflective and transmissive media. Unfortunately, he’s a dumbass on this point, especially the latter part.
Other OSes/distros didn’t just *happen* to not pick the orange to brown spectrum as their default choice. Brown contrasts only well with a very limited set of other colors and orange is too closely associated with the concepts ‘alert,’ ‘fire danger,’ etc. Moreover, in the Western hemisphere, brown and orange are seasonal colors.
As other people have noted here, there are better ways to distinguish your brand than color schemes.
Please hire really great artist, and let make them the really good artwork, and listen for people and give them what they want, try to change the artwork for a black, blue, cyan, white tones, use darker parts for bars for example and light shaded tones in some other part of the desktop like wallpapers, make it really professional and beautiful, dark brown and orange is just plain ugly and scares people off, and as i said, i live in a tropical country, which normally is very hot and using a brown theme just puts me off, change the style for a new cooler design.
This just looks really uncluttered and ugly,
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Specs/EdgyArtworkPlan/Ponder
Just look at the Mac and see why they rock with artwork and follow their example.
Some of those Kubuntu ideas don’t look bad at all. A bit of transparecy, if not exaggerated, could actually make *buntu look more attractive.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Kubuntu-Edgy-Ideas
I’m just afraid that Mark’s next “artistic vision” might be pink. 😛
Now this is what I would call a great looking boot screen (or whatever): https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Kubuntu-Edgy-Ideas?action=A…
I definitely could see myself using it even though currently I don´t use Kubuntu.
WOW! I loved that one!
that with KDE 4 will simply just rock
Edited 2006-11-15 23:28
but it seriously sucks, I just want my old icons back.
There are a few nice new ones though, but overall i was not impressed.