To all hackers and freedom lovers of Gothenburg:
We’re going to celebrate Software Freedom Day on Saturday.
We’ll meet at Linneplatsen at 15.00. Bring drinkable and eatable things. Depending on the weather, we’re either going to head to Slottsskogen or Gnutiken.
Software Freedom Day Gothenburg
September 16th, 2009A tale of menus
July 23rd, 2009Had a great meeting with the rest of the GNOME Art Team at GCDS!
Together we came up with some points on where we would like to take GNOME visually in the coming 9 months.
One of the things we all agreed on is that a new widget theme is not going to be enough to create a visually stunning desktop.
Fewer but better
At the same time as we’re introducing massive 256×256 icons for places that require 64×64 and up, we also want to take the opportunity to cut down a bit on the massive amount of icons currently used in menus. At the same time, we also want to introduce some guidelines on when to properly use them to enrich your interfaces.
The current approach is that some items have them, and some don’t, and this is because no artist had time to draw it, or because the action is too complex to convey in a small icon, or both. And hand to heart, that’s not a really good guideline.
Getting rid of things (or changing defaults for that matter) is always tricky, as the initial reaction from people used to the old behavior is that nothing of value gets added. However, we believe this is a visually more attractive default and that it will result in a cleaner and more efficient interface (and you can always change it back).
What are the exceptions?
A menu item shall have a icon if it represents a dynamic object such as a:
- Application
- File or bookmark
- Device
How do I make sure the exceptions show in the menus?
Just patch your application to use gtk-image-menu-item-set-always-show-image
Won’t this slow me down, as icons are so quick to spot?
While it’s true that the eye recognize color very quickly, having both text and image also means more information for the brain to process. It’s also worth to note that text skimming speed for adults is around 400-700 wpm.
Friends of GNOME postcards
June 17th, 2009Everyone who signs up for a a monthly Friends of GNOME donation receive a postcard from a GNOME hacker as a thank you. We found the regular, touristy postcards a bit boring, so we decided to create some ourselves, based on motives by four GNOME artists.
They are drawn by Kalle Persson, Vinicius Depizzol, Máirín Duffy and myself (Andreas Nilsson).
So if you would like one of these, sign up to be a monhtly donor!
Once you’re done with that, you can encourage others to donate by putting one of these badges on your blog or website.
blobs of color
May 21st, 200910 ways for an artist to contribute to the GNOME Project
May 18th, 2009Are you a artist who feel like contributing a couple of pixels to the GNOME project, but don’t know where to start?
Here are ten open issues that need your help today:
- Mockups for expanders
- Icons for new widgets in Glade
- New icons for cpufreq applet
- Icons for GNOME DVB Daemon
- Few Mud Icons for Gnome-Mud
- Logo and icon for Python RevEditor
- Improved icons for Psppire
- Logo for Rygel
- Generic icons for audio device form factors: Headsets, Headphones, ext. Speakers
- Logo and icons for Déjà Dup, a backup program
Thunderbird visual refresh on Linux
May 7th, 2009Been working on the appearance of Thunderbird for the last two months now and as things are starting to land in the Nightly builds, things are indeed starting to look quite nice. As always, Lapo have been of great help in the icon department.
I’ve always enjoyed Thunderbird and it’s predecessors that have been following me since I started out with web stuff when I was around 14 years old. Therefore, working on this would really scratch my own itch as I felt it always looked out of place on my Linux desktop and allow me to give back to the e-mail client that served me with so many messages over the years (and pay the rent, yay!).
Anyway, here are some shots:
Main window:
Compose:
Address book:
As you might note, the icons in the main toolbar pretty much look the same, this is mainly because they are going away as soon as the great work that’s been going on with the new toolbar layout lands.
As we’ve used GTK+ stock items wherever we can, your folders in the sidebar will of course look native. Comparison between regular GNOME, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu:
Please check out a Nightly build and report any issues.
Infographics remix
April 13th, 2009Cool, it appears MadsRH took my work and remixed it.
Next step, take his work and remix it for the GNOME 3.0 schedule!
Pongo – a inexpensive UI lab
February 11th, 2009Ever wish you had your own UI-lab, but can’t build one with all the expensive cameras, big boxes and one-way-mirrors in your house right now?
Pongo 0.1 (requires python and istanbul)
It catches sound and video from your web cam, records your desktop and merges it together into a ogg file that’s ready to publish on the web.
Hope anyone finds it useful. We’re planning on a more proper UI and something that catches the key and mouse presses.
Here is a short screencast (sorry for the colors, don’t hesitate to send fixes if you know what’s wrong)
Big thanks to Daniel and Olivier, who helped me with some initial tests and Jan, who put together the final python code.
promising and forgetting
February 10th, 2009Went to FOSDEM during weekend. As always at conferences, I got a lot of requests for artwork for various things. As I tend to have somewhat of a goldfish memory, can everyone who asked me for stuff please add it to the GNOME Artwork requests page?
Thanks and apologies.
- Your humble pixel pusher
Friends of GNOME website process
January 21st, 2009Glad to see the new Friends of GNOME website finally online.
Kalle and I started with this when he and Clemens was over at my place some time ago.
We started with ideas and sketches. We tried a couple of different approaches and ideas for the selection of the donation level and a bunch of different ways of displaying the page where you select your hacker and different illustrations.
Then we took the best sketches and imported those into Inkscape for selecting the best colors, choosing the exact styling of the elements and made sure the text that Stormy provided us with would fit etc.
The last step was the actual html+php+css+jquery voodoo. I spent quite some time battling php (I didn’t really know any php before) to allow the page to display different things on the second page, depending on your choice on the first page and trying to understand how paypal worked exactly. Kalle fixed some jQuery and made sure my broken php snippets would work properly. Collaborating over Dropbox worked pretty well actually.
I also made a banner that all GNOME fans can put on their websites or blogs and link to http://www.gnome.org/friends.
Someone also asked if I could make a general GNOME Lover banner too, so here is that as well.
