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Ubuntu Gets a New Visual Identity
buntcake writes "Canonical has launched a new visual identity for the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ubuntu is shedding its previous brown look and adopting a more professional color scheme with purple and orange. The colors will be used in a new GNOME theme and boot splash for Ubuntu 10.04. According to updated design documents that were published in the Ubuntu wiki, 'light' is the underlying concept behind the new visual identity. It displaces the 'human' concept that has been part of Ubuntu's theming and brand vernacular for the past five years. Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon has posted a screenshot and additional information."
Don't change all the time like Windows seems to do. Be yourself and we'll accept you. Rebranding almost never helps. Consistency does.
Is professionalism a virtue? I like the notion of Ubuntu as being warm and fuzzy, especially with the adjective+animal names for the releases.
Hey, how's it going?
Does anyone actually ever use the default Ubuntu theme? I know whenever I install Gnome the first thing I do is set it to clearlooks.
now im going to have to spend extra time getting the window tools to the right side of the window?
ugh this blows
cmon everyone knows the left side is the wrong one![/pun]
in other news they really should be using the technix theme. it could use some tweaking with the font colors, but other than that, its excellent imho
They changed the color scheme from brown to beige. How exciting.
The small icons are still too cluttered. They're simply smaller versions of the large icons, which never works very well.
This is long overdue. The brown theme was a major turnoff for me. It seems silly, I know, but the first impression is an important one. This was at least part of the reason I preferred Kubuntu. The quick screenshot looks a lot better to me.
And yes, of course you can change the colors, but there's a lot of value of a nice out-of-the-box experience. Developing your own color scheme is trickier than you'd think to get "right."
I'm sad that the babysh*t brown color will go away!!!
Don't like that the Window control buttons (maximize, close, etc.) are moved to the top left of the window, instead of the top right where they used to be.
1. I'm used to them being on the right in both current Ubuntu and Windows. I know Mac has them on the left, but I never liked that.
2. If the window is partially dragged off-screen, I can click either the X on the right side, or File -> Close on the left side. With both being on one side, I need to or drag the window back (if it works, which often doesn't if its dragged so much to the extreme that it's hard to grab the title bar with your mouse).
I know the problem usually has trivial workarounds (such as a keyboard shortcut to close), but meh. Why not leave it the way it worked before.
Because brown seems so frivolous compared to a pair of secondary colours, and the other combinations were already taken by Barney, the Irish rebels, and these folks?
I suppose that's why industries that care about their professional image never use brown for anything.
--MarkusQ
Does anyone else think it looks more like mac os X?
"Purple and orange" is a professional color scheme?
I don't even know what color tie goes with a blue shirt, but even I know that's awful.
Looks like the server's starting to buckle under the Slashdot Effect!
Here is the CORAL link to the page with screenshots:
http://www.jonobacon.org.nyud.net/2010/03/03/refreshing-the-ubuntu-brand/
Willie...
Window control buttons are on the wrong side, if I wanted a Mac I would get one. Stop changing crap, clearlooks human or just clearlooks would have been fine.
I would be happier if things like mounting digital cameras worked consistently from one release to the next without scouring the web looking for the latest hoop to jump through. Yes I can find the answer and make it work but a lot of potential converts will give up and pop the Windows 7 install disk in.
True that.
"We changed the wallpaper!" OMG! NEWS!
Also everything about Ubuntu and the word brown, such as: ..."
"Ubuntu is shedding its previous brown look"
always reminds me of Apples Zune ad, can't find it on YouTube but it's like they talk about all the colors options and then mentions "[pause] brown
Hurray for brown!
After all, it's not all that hard to get new themes for GTK or anything, but still, Purple and Orange?
Two things are clear:
1. Heavy drug use is now too commonplace at Canonical.
2. The drugs they are currently using last long enough for them to make a press release and a couple of websites demonstrating the effects of said drugs.
The only question that remains is what are they smoking and where can I get some?
Ubuntu gets a new theme and ./ STILL uses the Debian icon?
I wish they'd stay focused on usability and 'ergonomic' issues, and not waste time on colors and wallpapers and other bubblegum that half of the user base will be guaranteed not to like anyway. I'm not picking on Ubuntu; this criticism certainly applies to Windows and other OSs and Linux distros, too. Too much time wasted on fluff that doesn't matter much.
Wait a minute... Something was said... Something not good...
I lol'd that JayRott thought it was a "new look". I just gave my Win7 a "new look" by changing the background on the desktop and the colour of the Window frames.
Makes me wonder why this is even newsworthy. Surely there's better things that Ubuntu could be doing?
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
They've moved the window frame buttons to a place that's counter-intuitive for most people but they've also cocked that up in a way that doesn't even make sense for people used to OSX (the buttons are still laid out in the same order as if right-aligned). So now you've got buttons in places nobody is used to, the X button no longer benefits from the 'infinite-dimension' effect of being in a corner, and plus you've got the window frame buttons directly above the menubar - instantly making 10% of attempts to open the Edit menu into accidental window closes. I guess they never stopped to think why most WMs have them on the right and OSX has them on the left.
Brilliant.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Brown and orange at least look good together, like gold or wheat (they finally moved away from baby poop brown and used more orange in the last few releases). Purple and orange look like domestic violence.
You might wanna get that checked out.
That reminds me. Some people just have a fixation on a color.
My mom is gonna paint her red car...
wait for it...
you guessed it...
red...
Not like her car needs a paint job. And shes not getting the same red color, apparently the red she wants is 2 more notches red than the current red. I didn't realize there was more than 1 kind of red, but hay, I'm a guy.
reminds me of the bash quote:
http://www.bash.org/?914350
<Rex> He's a guy, he only sees like 10 colours or something, don't do this to him.
Honestly though, it takes you what? a minute to change the style if you don't like it? I understand its Ubuntu, but skin change? Slow news day much?
O.o
It's called Kubuntu.
Yes, Windows 7 isn't terrible, but it lacks the user-friendlyness and universal knowledge that XP had.
When you use weasel-words like "universal knowledge" (what the hell does that even mean?), it's hard for people to refute you. But Microsoft does indeed do usability testing, a lot of it, and Windows 7 is provably more user friendly than Windows XP. (And since it's bound to come up: so is Office 2007.)
And Vista might be "considered trash," but it's also measurably superior to XP-- in fact I think it says something that Vista and Windows 7 are virtually identical, yet for some reason 7 is liked and Vista is hated. (What it says? Slashdotters make knee-jerk snap decisions.)
Usability isn't about hand-waving or saying "I think this color looks nice," it's about sitting people in front of your product and watching them use it. It's about defining a task, and measuring how well they complete it using your OS. It's about statistics, not hunches. Most divisions of Microsoft do that consistently and habitually. (Some don't.)
In that rant, I'm not saying to say anything about this move from Ubuntu-- for all I know the new UI is great, I haven't used it yet, and I haven't seen any of their decision-making process. I'm just saying that your statement about XP is plain wrong.
Comment of the year
Shuttleworth or someone else with decisive control over the default theme is most likely colorblind. I find that colorblind people tend to chose odd muddy browns, greens, and yellows when coloring things on the computer. You can frequently spot them when they prepare Powerpoint presentations.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I don't know about you, but I don't give a wet crap what the default theme looks like. Regardless of operating system, the defaults last just long enough for me to figure out how to change them to what I like. The only time I'm turned off by the defaults is when I can't change them. About the only graphics change in Ubuntu I'd care about is better support for a broader range of graphics cards.
Mind you, if the change makes Ubuntu appeal more to the kind of people who think desktop color schemes make a difference in how professional they are, great. I'm just not one of those people, and I rather suspect most self-selected Linux users aren't, either.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
What I find stupid, is the moving of the window "action" buttons.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Oh, wow, I didn't notice that the first time I went over the images.
Also, I saw this image, and I was briefly confused when I saw that oblique image of the screen. For a minute, I thought there was a picture of a Mac with this wallpaper for some reason.
I hope I don't boot up the liveCD to find a dock replacing the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Ubuntu (or I guess GNOME) should be creating its own look, not ripping off of Microsoft and Apple.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Makes me wonder why this is even newsworthy.
It's newsworthy for two reasons.
First, it's the look of the OS out of the box. It's how it wants to show itself off to the users. If next Windows or OS X comes out with orange text on red background, you betcha it's going to be newsworthy!
Second, default Ubuntu theme, and specifically the color palette, has been ridiculed by practically everybody for a loong time.
Maybe with some spiffy ads:
"Hi my name is Bobby Jo, and Oohbantu 10.4 waz mine idea."
I think if anybody ever bothered to use the default GNOME theme, the one the upstream developers ship, they would appreciate much of an improvement every Ubuntu theme has been over the default.
They didn't even copy OS X. If you look closely, the relative order of the buttons is the same as it was before - and not with Close in the left corner.
It's a major WTF no matter how you look at it. It's like they were deliberately trying to confuse users coming from as many platforms as possible.
Ubuntu dumps the brown
I'm an accomplished adult and yet I can only barely resist the urge to make a poo joke.
/* No Comment */
These open source designs always scream open source. They just lack the polish and careful thought that you get with Windows or OSX. Far too often the designer resorts to being different for the sake of being different. Having done interface design for years now there are a few things that come to mind off the top of my head I'd work on.
A few critiques:
Overall the design looks a bit dated. I'm not suggesting they should have done something obnoxious, but it feels like insufficient effort was put into this.
Icons are flat, like they tried going for a dimensional look but either lacked the talent or the inclination to go all the way.
Font selection is clumsy. The font itself is quite good, but it's a bit on the large size given the scale, but more importantly everything is crammed together.
Icons and buttons almost look randomly placed. Why is zoom sitting between some icons and view selection. Is view selection even so important that it needs to be featured prominently? The folder buttons are too pronounced in relation to everything else and there's insufficient visual separation between that and the places dropdown.
There's insufficiently visual separation between windows in the foreground and background, although honestly I think OSX has this problem too. It gets problematic trying to pick something out when multiple windows are open. There's no sense of prioritization to anything so everything blurs together at a glance.
Those windows are poorly balanced. Why is everything left aligned, leaving most of the title banner empty?
This really looks like the rough draft of a GUI. If you want to sell an OS to the average user you've really got to make it approachable. That means making it visually appealing and polished. This is one of those things that doesn't seem important when done right, but people always notice it when something is missing. Also important is giving real consideration to the user experience. These designs look to me like someone simply copied Windows and added in a bunch of elements from OSX. Certainly there's a sense of familiarity users have with Windows, but why not study both OSX and Windows and try to get a sense for what works and what doesn't then build your GUI around that? And based on some comments I've seen it seems elements of the design even break Fitt's laws.
Having used the previous version of Ubuntu I wouldn't really say this is an improvement at all.
It appears to be an edited rip of Aakash Soneri's Sone. (A comparison: Sone is teal, the new logo face is wine, where it overlaps is cobalt blue.) The changes appear to be as insubstantial as adding a slant to ascenders and shifting the baselines of some of the glyphs.
If Canonical modified Sone, didn't license it, and they start freely distributing it ("our global community will still maintain access to the resources needed to construct logos that use the branding" - so either the modified glyphs for the logo as svg, or the modified font itself), that's a dick move.
And if they did license it, then why is an open-source project licensing commercial fonts and calling it a reflection of the project?
Maybe it's a placeholder - who knows? Canonical doesn't say anything about the font's origin or license in the linked documentation, nor does Canonical's Jono Bacon in his nearly identical announcement.
But it is disappointing to see an open source project - whose community already made LGPL-licensed typefaces for their current logo - make and publicize such a half-assed effort, even in a preliminary stage, without any explanation on the decision.
When you say, as an organization based on community contribution:
And you follow that with a logo that's based on a commercial typeface, you're reneging on that intent in at least one of two ways:
Even if Sone was correctly licensed, and Canonical got permission to modify it for their logo and future redistribution, why not get it from the community?
And if it wasn't licensed correctly, then is Ubuntu following the lead of Arial and just ripping things off in a legal but unethical manner when they can't find what they want in a convenient license?
(And maybe it's a coincidence - a really bad coincidence that still should be fixed. Without any explanation, nobody can tell.)
When you get away from Windows, you can not only choose the UI (bash, ksh, zsh, etc) or GUI, but also change it. Before Microsoft became such a problem, it was the norm for people to not just tweak but show off their customizations. I know that most people really piss and moan about tweaking the defaults, but it is possible. The knowledge is gone from the mainstream, but the functionality is still there.
Whether you use KDE, CDE, Xfce, or GNOME you can choose not just the theme (appearance) but also the behavior. That goes especially for the window manager. You can do more with the window manager than deciding to have jiggly jello effects or not. When you talk about the GUI on a Linux, Solaris or BSD distro you're usually conflating about three things : the desktop environment, the window manager, and the settings for those two. It's not even necessary to run a full desktop, you can get by quite handily with just a window manager. Check out Enlightenment, OpenBox, Scrotwm,
Of course the desktop environment and window manager will come with default settings but those can be changed. If an in-your-face example is needed for just how much these can be configure to meet your needs install plain vanilla FVWM and give it a try. Then after that, install FVWM-crystal theme. Night and day different is there.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Or you can go direct to the actual Ubuntu Brand page and see the new screenshots as they were meant to be viewed, i.e. larger.
I've been loudly clammoring for Canonical to ditch the brown for the better part of a decade. On the forums, on IRC, on /., on Reddit, on my blog, literally everywhere, I've been pleading and begging for Shuttleworth et al to pull their heads out of their asses and make something that just generally appeals to a whole lot of people.
Brown doesn't. It was hideous, and somewhat embarrassing, especially when I tried to convince some people who ONLY WANTED FIREFOX that Ubuntu was a superior OS:
"But why is it so UGLY?!?"
"Hold on.... click click click..... Is that better?"
and of course those clicks are always changing the hideous default theme.
That said, this new theme is nearly as bad. Great, getting rid of the brown for.... PURPLE?!?!
Purple and Orange look god damned atrocious. Why don't you just make a better OS, and copy the superior look of just about every other OS on the market.
Points for originality only count if you don't look like shit. This new design, STILL LOOKS LIKE SHIT.
Why not just take a cue from Linux Mint? They actually have a very decent and PLEASING default look that is even original and different compared to Win and OSX.
While you are fixing that, why not go ahead and install superior default apps by default?
VLC is much, much better than any other video player for Linux.
Thunderbird is much better than whatever that crap is you default to.
Deluge is better than Transmission.
Audacious is much better than Rhythmbox.
In fact, other than Open Office, most of the Ubuntu default apps are right crap.
It wouldn't be hard to make 2010 the year of Linux on the desktop. All the tools are here now.
Sadly, all the distros I've seen are still too bulky, too ugly, and have all the worst default apps. Ubuntu is definitely a good example of that.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
The new branding looks very, very good. Purists may complain that this has nothing to do with Linux or its popularity, but the truth of the matter is that branding matters. Very much.
The new website, CD cover design, store and goodies and the new smoother lighter themes are part of the things that will attract people to Ubuntu. I love the new design and think its much clearer and simpler and above all more consistent than either Windows 7, Microsoft's site (which is chaotic on a good day) and Mac OSX (and I say that typing this on a Mac Pro). People like shiny, and it will make a difference, even to corporate IT where the PHBs will be attracted to (or at least not put off by) the design, even if they know nothing about the technicalities of Linux.
Now, if only they could provide some input into better IDEs for developers, then I think it will be on a much better track.
Oops, forgot to add the NSFW warning. However, the mentions of "prudish" and "body painting" should be adequate tip-offs.
I suspect the linked images are only mildly NSFW, even by prim North American standards. The calendar wallpapers are nudes, but not showing the naughty bits, while the girl with body paint is wearing pants as well as paints.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire