The Creative Penguin: The GNOME Art Duo Speak

uninet writes "After spending time with Torsten Rahn and Everaldo Coelho earlier this year, we continue our Creative Penguin series in a discussion with Tuomas "Tigert" Kuosmanen and Jakub "Jimmac" Steiner of Ximian. If you've ever admired the beautiful artwork of GNOME, these are the gentlemen responsible for it. How did they get involved? Why should you be interested in desktop artwork? They discuss all of this and more with Open for Business' Timothy R. Butler. Read the full interview here."

Re:"beautiful"?

[robson]

Umm ... I use GNOME at home and work, and enjoy it very much, but it's a far cry from beautiful.

I think I disagree. When faced with the various options, I found GNOME to be most attractive and thematically unified of them all.

Beautful icons

[jeorgen]

I have started using Gnome/Redhat recently, and I am seriously impressed by the icons. I teach user interface design, emphasizing silouette and clean lines with regards to icons. And the icons on my Gnome desktop are gorgeous (I normally use Windows though I believe Macintosh 6.05 and thereabouts was the bees knees user interface wise).

This good UI design seems to permeate more areas of the Gnome world. Yesterday I discovered the moleskine [micampe.it] editor. It has the same graphical style and user interface simplicíty. Well worth a look. Gorgeous.

/jeorgen

Why theme everything separately?

[jorleif]

We theme almost everything - sawfish, metacity, gtk, nautilus, xmms, make splash screens, wallpapers, background tiles etc, making it all fit togerther

Would it not be a lot easier to achieve consistency on the desktop if all these applications used the same theming engine? I know there are people out there who like having nautilus look different from other applications and xmms look different than anything else, but there are also people who like the look and feel to be as consistent as possible, ideally so that even KDE applications would look similar to gnome apps. I know that it is not in any way trivial to provide the same theming for all apps but it would definitely be a very nice and useful feature. And while we're at it why not make all applications use the same keybindings for the same things? Isn't that very similar to themeing at least from a technical point of view?

Re:"beautiful"?

[IamTheRealMike]

I'd have to disagree. Take a look at some of these screenshots:

this [sylph.be]
or this [duke.edu]

and of course my own desktop [theoretic.com]

There are a load more here [duke.edu].

Default gnome can have an ugly widget, but 2.2 goes quite a long way to addressing that with the metathemes system. And really, I think with only a smidgen of effort you can make it look better than anything else out there, including MacOS, which I find just to look too "fat" and stripey. GNOME2 feels clean in comparison.