On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Dylan McCall <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi! > > > The new fad in UI design is white space. Even though GNOME has very > thick padding inside windows, we seem to be behind on this one :) > > A big problem with GNOME's look right now, and this seems to be the case > no matter what theme one looks at, is the huge number of lines scattered > about the screen. They are used to separate two blocks of content in > menus, lists, toolbars and more. What I find is that we have ended up > with these lines as almost the only tools at hand for separating > content! > > Of particular interest to me is that these separators, functionally, > have very little separation. They create a lot of visual noise, people > interpret the lines as separators if they see them, but at the end of > the day the two chunks of content are still squeezed closely together. > At a glance, the separation is not really clear. > > Lots of new applications are moving away from the multitudes of lines, > though. The new Palimpsest Disk Utility is a good, full example. It > separates pieces of its UI through GtkAlignment widgets. This is done > because the semantically appropriate GtkHSeparator is a horrible, ugly > looking thing. > > So, let's fix that! > > As an experiment, I dug open Impression's gtkrc and tinkered with the > width and height of GtkMenuItemSeparator and GtkHSeparator. This is all > pretty straight-forward, though it also needs some theme engine work > which I haven't tried yet. Unfortunately, the TreeView widget seems to > do internal widgets like separators different than the menu widget does. > I couldn't figure out how to theme that, so Nautilus's ugly separator > (my inspiration!) remains unresolved. > > As a result of that and laziness, my pictures are mostly a reasonably > attainable mockup, except the menus :) > They can be seen at: > http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/mockups/whitespace-not-lines/ > > I definitely don't think the mockups are perfect, or even particularly > excellent. It may be worth some pondering, though. > > > Bye, > Dylan > > > -- > ubuntu-art mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art > I never really even noticed all those lines, but now that you mention it, it does look kind of ugly. I say even get rid of the lines surrounding select boxes from the drop-down menus, as seen in your "nautilus-menu.png<http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/mockups/whitespace-not-lines/nautilus-menu.png>", just without the 1 pixel outlines on the boxes. Also, could you email me the widgets, I don't really know what your talking about with the GtkAlighn.
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