The Creative Penguin: The GNOME Art Duo Speak 25
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."
No pictures? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No pictures? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:No pictures? (Score:1)
Re:No pictures? (Score:2)
"beautiful"? (Score:2, Insightful)
That is, unless you're comparing it to Motif and Win 3.1 or you're trying to butter them up for another interview.
Re:"beautiful"? (Score:3, Informative)
Take a look at this site [musichall.cz] and this one [gimp.org]. As far as GUI artwork goes, it's about the best I've ever seen. The OSX stuff may give it a run for its money, but the Microsoft folks can't offer anything close (obviously this is just my dumb opinion). Keep in mind that the truly "good" artwork hasn't really shown up until Gnome 2.0, and I think quite a bit of it is only packaged with 2.2 and beyond.
Re:"beautiful"? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"beautiful"? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I disagree. When faced with the various options, I found GNOME to be most attractive and thematically unified of them all.
Re:"beautiful"4 (Score:1)
I assume your 'options' were KDE, gnome, lestif, and raw Xlib. Take a peek at BeOS, NeXTstep/openstep (and someday gnustep), Mac OS, QNX, Amiga, RiscOS, Plan 9, SkyOS, hell, just about anywhere.
Re:"beautiful"? (Score:1)
Gnome graphics are decent quality, but generally fall into the category of unintrusive. I watch my desktop several hours a day, and want something that actually pleases my eye. But then again, I'm happy with wmx.
Re:"beautiful"? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:"beautiful"? (Score:1, Flamebait)
There's an oxymoron if I ever seen one.
/. Icon? (Score:4, Insightful)
Beautful icons (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Why theme everything separately? (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Why theme everything separately? (Score:2, Informative)
KDE and Gnome is working on a standard together, freedesktop.org, and the goal is to create a standard for things like themes.