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Human Impression

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.

Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.

Concept

Create a theme which presents applications framed in a neutral warm color that supports dark and light text and icons.

• Stable Engine: This theme is designed to use established GTK engines such as Clearlooks and pixmap.

• Human Icon Theme: Must support current Human icon set.

• Visually neutral: A neutral base does not distract from the content being displayed and is easy to view for long periods of time. This adds value when viewing images or graphics where the theme may influence the perception of the content.

• Two Panel Desktop: This is the GNOME standard, stay with it.

* Why Not Black: The base color of a theme removes that color from the pallet of every object which supports the theme. For example black text does not display on a black background (i.e. no longer a choice) and an icon which is mostly black or some other dark color does not display well on a black background (i.e. no longer a choice). IMO most of today's icons were designed to display on a light background and would require a significant amount of re-work.

Comments on This Release

Please keep in mind this is an alpha release. The primary engine used is clearlooks with some elements embellished with graphics using the pixmap engine. Nearly every style has been expanded with all of its background, foreground, base, and text properties exposed. The default attribute for any specific property is @error which is defined as the color cyan (light blue - #00ffff). If you see this color, that is an error.

The metacity theme is new and uses round buttons which prelight to Ubuntu colors.

• Yellow = Shelf Window to tray
• Orange = Minimum/Maximum Window
• Red = Close Window

The box to the left of the window title displays window options and the circle in the lower right (when displayed) is the re-size grip.

Schedule

11/20/2008 - Alpha 1

• Review of current themes to determine design goals.
  • Dark color scheme which agrees with Ubuntu yellow, red, and orange colors
  • Default applications display as designed
  • Quick execution
  • Reliable operation

12/18/2008 - Alpha 2

• Theme is developed to point where it can be tested and reviewed
• Preliminary artwork in place
• Issues with specific programs identified (e.g. Evo, gFTP, Firefox)

01/15/2009 - Alpha 3

• Most blue errors resolved

02/05/2009 - Alpha 4

• All blue errors resolved
• Most remaining errors resolved

02/26/2009 - Alpha 5

• Artwork frozen
• All remaining errors resolved
• Add performance tweaks

03/12/2009 - Alpha 6

• Testing

03/26/2009 - Beta

• Done

Known Errors

• Blue errors

• Change 3D insensitive menu items

• Evolution headers use dark font
• gFTP menu needs work
• Firefox needs work
• Make adjustments to color and tint

Preview Screen Shots

• The Appearance Preferences screen is a good example of the notebook style. It also shows the three main colors of the theme at work with a white canvas.

• Inkscape is an excellent example of widgets and colors at play.

• Firefox using the Totem plugin playing a quick time trailer.
• Rhythmbox is another key application with widgets at play. This application also takes advantage of the new scale widget.

• Folder view of Nautilus.
• Standard widget factory view.

Brasero

The Brasero example shows the progress bar at work.

Menu

Menus with an orange "prelight" and enhanced background.

UpdateManager

An example of a tree view object.

VolumeControl

An example of the scale widget. The handle prelights from transparent to yellow.

Comments

• Comments welcome!

Download

• Download here: Impression.tar.gz

CategoryArtwork