[Sugar-devel] Design Aesthetic (was Performance issues on XO 1 (Re: TamTamMini))

[Walter Bender]

Renaming an off-topic fork of the thread.

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19 November 2013 07:08, Sebastian Silva <sebastian at fuentelibre.org>
> wrote:

[snip]

>> A platform is about the applications available to it. Sugar in my opinion
>> has issues here as well. I tend to concur with Flavio that some aesthetics
>> rework wouldn't hurt either. For what it's worth I always found interesting
>> what the advertising firm that worked on Sugar published in their website:
>> http://new.pentagram.com/2006/12/new-work-one-laptop-per-child/
>>
>> On the topic of aesthetics, it's interesting to see what even happens with
>> adding a compositor (in metacity's gconf key) and changing some colors in
>> style.py
>> I recently noticed that in ancient versions (pre 0.82) the Journal items
>> were separated with a thin line. This helped readability and gave the sense
>> that each line was an object.
>>
>> Maybe I just went off topic (again) but now that we are sharing...
>
>
> There would be a lot to discuss about UX but honestly until we figure out
> how to work together I don't feel much like going on that topic. We are
> unlikely to find common ground on something that complex if we can't even
> sync on basic profiling (I'm referring to the rest of the thread, not to
> this email).
>
> And even if we had productive discussion we would not have resources to
> implement the changes. IMO there are some resources but they are too
> dispersed because we are unable to work together.
>

Pentagram is not an advertising firm. They are one of the premiere
graphic-design companies in the world. That said, nothing in the
article that Sebastian linked to seems to jump out. What do you find
interesting about it?

Regarding aesthetics, Flavio and I have had numerous discussions since
his post. It is a difficult area to reach consensus, but the argument
that I made (even with {Pentagram when we were first designing Sugar)
was that we should keep things simple and minimal -- not to impose a
"Swiss aesthetic", but to leave room for each Sugar user to create
their own look and feel. Of course, we have only recently been able to
include tools to facilitate customization of the interface (made
easier in my opinion in GTK3). Our users added patches to set the
background screen, change the icons, etc. If we are going to invest
resources in this area, I suggest we continue down the path of
enabling Sugar to be an expression of the end-user's aesthetic, rather
than that of a designer at Pentagram or anywhere else.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org