plasma, panels, colours

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 06 November 2008, Nuno Pinheiro wrote:
> A Friday 07 November 2008 00:22:24, Aaron J. Seigo escreveu:

> > 	http://plasma.kde.org/media/light_coloured_panel.png
>
> i will prefer just to make active more diferent and maybe make the bg more
> trasnparent... that will work..

that's really just avoiding the issue (which i'll describe more clearly below)

> > it's really a lot more appealing with a non-black background. it could
> > still even be a dark colour, but i really don't know how many distros are
> > going to keep with the default theme when the default is, well, rather
> > bleak.
>
> The more I look at distros the more I'm positive they have no idea...
> mandriva simply sucked... and  opensuse didnt look any beter...

i agree; but what they were doing was looking at the default, deciding that 
wouldn't work with their audience (and i agree with them there) and replacing 
it. unfortunately, they aren't really qualified to make those replacements and 
so instead came up with something that is overall worse.

and yet, here's the interesting thing, people in general respond better to 
those choices that the defaults. sort of an odd situation, but i'll talk about 
that below as well.

> > i was hoping of putting this off until 4.3, but i'm increasingly thinking
> > that waiting is not only unnecessary but also problematic.

> I think 4.3 is a good date to a major revamp to the style.

sure. but i'm not asking for a major revamp. i just don't want white-on-black-
on-black or black-on-grey-on-black ... why? again, see below.

> IM not sure I undrstod what you ment by seting up a set of colors  by code
> that would be applied to the theme? If so i tend to think its a bad idea...

those colours that would be accessible by code would be used exactly where 
they are right now: for text that is drawn on top of the SVGs, for things like 
the colour hintings on the pager, etc. we can already sort of tint SVGs as 
well, but that's a completely different topic.

now, HOW we get those colours to tint text and coded highlights is currently 
overly simplistic and would make things such as a dark-elements-on-cream-base 
theme really hard or even infeasible.

the current colour system does not really take a broad, all-encompassing 
approach to colour needs based on context such as "this text will get painted 
on that svg over there"

> here are a couple of alternatives please have a look.
>
> http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/test/

so, all of these pictures, while pretty in their own right, all really miss my 
concern, which falls into two parts:

a) black as the foundational colour is not what i want to communicate to 
people. for those not familiar with colour psychology:

	 http://psychology.about.com/od/sensationandperception/a/color_black.htm

black is a sexy and sophisticated colour, but when *everything* is black (or 
shades thereof) you instead get "ominous", "scary", "sad", "broken". there's a 
reason goth kids wander about in black-on-black-on-black, after all. it 
communicates a very specific message that is highly charged due to millions of 
years of evolving where night is dark and big scary things come out of that 
dark and eat you.

black, however, can be sexy. when it's used as a highlight, as an anchor or on 
a feature piece. but as the everything colour ... not really. there are 
specific situations where that *can* work, a working desktop is really not one 
of them.


* contrast, so as to be able to see the elements! one can also phrase this as 
"less subtlety".

as it is, i really, really like the black buttons of the taskbar and systray 
and pager and what not. and they look really, really nice when there is enough 
contrast to be able to actualy notice them.

remember that people will be using this on LCDs that don't have art quality 
crispness, in well lit situations (which tends to drown out subtleness) and 
with eyes that may not be well tuned to such things. this only makes the 
situation worse.



i base all this one two things: human psychology on the one hand (which is 
pure theory, though well understood and "proven") and market feedback.

thankfully, i do not think it requires a full redo of the theme, it just 
requires a non-black-block as the panel background.

the replace needs to go well with the rest of the elements, certainly, and  
necessarily does not need to be bright, light or lacking saturation. it could 
be a deep, dark, rich colouring.

here are some of the '09 luxury car dashboards:

http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/1229/v134/imageonthefly.autodatadirect.com/images/?IMG=90MBGI2L.jpg&WIDTH=425
http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/1229/v134/imageonthefly.autodatadirect.com/images/?IMG=90AUGIC2.jpg&WIDTH=425
http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/1229/v134/imageonthefly.autodatadirect.com/images/?IMG=90AUGID1.jpg&WIDTH=425
http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/1229/v134/imageonthefly.autodatadirect.com/images/?IMG=CAB70JAC101C0304.jpg&WIDTH=425
http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/1229/v134/imageonthefly.autodatadirect.com/images/?IMG=90BMGIJ1.jpg&WIDTH=425
http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/1229/v134/imageonthefly.autodatadirect.com/images/?IMG=90LEGIH2.jpg&WIDTH=425

in nearly all of those cars, the dashes use black in very significant ways. but 
the entire dash is not black. 

i also understand, and accept, that there will be people who love an all-black 
approach. i hope that others can understand that our current default is not 
working out at the moment, if only because our downstreams are rejecting it 
outright (and replacing it with horrific results).

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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