August 9th, 2010 by
One of our key objectives when we started conceptualising the new themes was their ability to be immediately recognisable as Ubuntu, even if represented as a small screenshot. As easily recognised as when it used to be brown – but not that brown… the incarnation that we initially launched was a bold new statement: a little unrefined maybe, but a good starting block on which to build.
And so the evolution continues…
A lot has been learnt in the last year and we are now in the process of making constant tweaks and improvements. I have been working extensively with Andrea Cimitan (creator of the Murrine theme engine) over the last couple of months to improve and accelerate our workflow. It’s been fantastic having his extensive knowledge, ideas and fresh perspective to fine tune across the board.
There are far too many refinements to mention, but below are a few of note:
Removal of the beige/brown/cream tints to windows and buttons – it was rather intense and the buttons in particular felt too dark and claustrophobic. The whole interface has a lighter, refined and more precise approach.
Orange selection colour – far more obvious, contrasts well against both light and dark backgrounds. The orange selection is replaced with grey on deselected windows so as not to detract focus. The colour is still being tweaking to provide something that is comfortably useable and compliments/reflects the visual identity successfully.
The indicator menus now have an indented tab that doesn’t detract from the actual selection and a subtle internal gradient – far closer to the original designs.
Window buttons have been refined, bringing a more subtle/less pronounced satin treatment and more obvious states.
The taskbar has been redesigned to properly reflect the menubar.
Buttons now have an internal highlight and subtle glow.
Button selection is now a 2px external line glow.
The appearance of progress bars, scrubbers, checkboxes and radio buttons has been vastly improved and have received an added level of detail – they now feel far more homogenous (as if hewn from the same material set) and more in keeping with the original design.
A lot of work has gone into the scrollbar, to make it feel more light weight and integrated into the window and again to reflect better the appearance of other widgets (progress bars for example).
Try it out for yourself
As yet only the Ambiance theme is in a fit state for testing. Radiance now shares far more closely – so shouldn’t be far behind. I hope you can appreciate the differences as much as I can 
The Ambiance Maverick Beta is available here: http://people.ubuntu.com/~stefanor/light-themes/
Thanks to Stefano Rivera for assisting with the packaging – much appreciated.
It seems that the dark version of the theme has been leaked. This is still very much a work in progress and *at this stage* is not necessarily intended as a full theme but to be used by certain application environments that would benefit from a darker UI, for example: image/photo manipulation and video editing.
One more thing!
We’ll be wanting to support Ambiance and Radiance with a shiny new icon theme within the next year. I have a few ideas and am intending to put out a brief for submissions shortly. We’re looking for something truly special and would very much like some of the innovation from the community to shine through – to be the icing on the cake to our desktop identity.
The toolkit
92 Responseshide comments
This new theme looks gorgeous. Far more eye candy but I find the font-color a little clear and difficult to read. For example, the text inside the body content of the mails in Evolution needs to force the eyes cause this hasn’t enought contrast.
Keep the good work! While I wait for the Radiance version I’ll use this one.
The window icons are still on the wrong site but definitely an improvement.
Nice improvement, but i don’t like black menus…
Nice changes!
looking forward to having this in the official repos.
I wonder though, about that “original design” mentioned here or there in the article. Any pointers to where I can view those original designs? It’d be very interesting.
It is great!!!Nice details!!!
@Thorben
Light-themes first “incarnation” can be seen here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand
I know it’s super-boring and all that, but instead of focusing lots of energy on an all new icon set (for what is it, the 4th time now?), why don’t we work together and fix some of the 256×256 sizes for all the apps that come by default at least? They take a while longer than the small, usual sizes to draw but it looks really sweet when used in stuff like the alt-tab switcher.
Love the clean up that has been done to the theme. Can’t wait to see the final version.
Thanks for your improvements, really looks very good !!! I recently discover a new set of icon´s that really looks awesome !!! Look for FAENZA icon theme in DeviantArt, I’m using that theme of icons with de Ambiance stock of Ubuntu Lucid and it really looks wonderfull.
http://tiheum.deviantart.com/
Sorry about my English and greetings from Argentina ! Thanks a lot for all your work !
Nice improvements, thanks.
But I still think the window border should be anti-aliased.
Hi,
This is a wonderful theme. I wonder if you might make the deb-src packages available or the tarballs so that I can install them on debian?
Thanks!
Chris
It’s getting better and better
The only thing I really dislike how checked checkboxes look.
That is absolutely beautiful! A definite improvement.
@Xhacker: I don’t really think that anybody thinks that the window borders look better without anti-aliasing. The problem is that it’s not technically possible with the current window managers.
This is a great improvement! My only criticism is that it’s hard to tell which window the current one in the Window List (as shown in the screenshot with the Broadcast Messaging Preferences).
Very nice improvement. I like it.
Window title feels slightly off. I think it should be moved 1 pixel up.
Proportions between window close/min/max buttons and window title is a bit awkward too, maybe window buttons should be a bit smaller.
It’s an improvement indeed but elementary is still way ahead (for me at least).
Oh, and I was under the impression that 10.10 was finally going to have window borders with alpha channel? Still 1bit transparencies? :/
Looks great! But i think the window buttons are a bit too dark, the look like being disabled. I’d suggest using the old (white) colors.
Looks great! But i think the window buttons are a bit too dark, the look like being disabled. I’d suggest using the old (white) colors. Also the windows background color is a bit dark. I’d love to see a color like this: #F8F3E2
These are indeed very great improvements. Buttons look much more “light” and subtle. Window buttons are more stylish. While I was very unhappy about the theme shipped with lucid, I can’t stop looking at this one
Just a few things I’d like to mention:
- In my opinion selected menus in the panel need *a little* more contrast.
- The active window in the window list is hard to distinguish from the others. The background color could be a bit lighter.
- Perhaps the window buttons look better without that background behind them.
However, like Thorben, I also wonder what the “original design” is. Was it an internal mockup or internally discussed concepts?
Looks gorgeous !
But I sincerely think the menu button and menu need some improvement.
1.They look like two isolated components rather than a integrated whole because of the shadow caused by compiz/metacity .
2.Their color should distinguish themselves from other unfocused menu button or any other components. What about some lighter color ?
3. As rounded corner has already been used in the menu button (top right & top left ), it is better if the menu has rounded corner in the top left, bottom right & left to make them an integrity.
Looks great! But the checkboxes could look better.
With all due respect for the work you put up, it looks horrible. I was glad Ubuntu got rid of this orange tone which were too dominant, beige is less aggressive.
Now it seems that you go back to this orange tone. 10.4 was the first release the look of which i was satisfied with and did not feel like changing right away.
I hope you keep the Ambiance theme as it is now available for next releases.
Also i think changes should not be made for the sake of making changes, sometimes things are good enough the way they are and a theme should survive more than 6 months or users will not know what to look for to recognise Ubuntu.
Great improvements! These make the theme look much more professional/polished! I just have 2 comments (I’m using it now):
- The scrollbars are _really_ small when you need to scroll them using a wacom tablet, I find it difficult to click there.
- The default font color makes typing in this comment box really difficult, almost no contrast (see screenshot at: http://tweetphoto.com/37898680)
Keep up the good work!
P.S. I really like the theme of this website as well
WOW! THIS IS AWESOME!
The thing that most annoyed me was to have to customize Ubuntu every time upon installing it on a new system. Not having a real identity also sucked because we had to tweak like other OS’s so that it had a professional and clean look. Congratulations. The changes seems naive and obvious BUT they make A BIG DIFFERENCE. The new font, removing the boring brown from the theme, the new buttons and even the new scroll and progress bars made a HUGE improvement.
Am I just missing the transparency now?
Congratulations and yeah, NEW ICON THEMES!
what about replacing the orange color indicating menu selection with something less shocking? maybe a violet with some nice gradient and transparency and less defined borders should look more professional. don’t you think?
good job anyway!!
What is that font in the posted screenshots?
I think that the nice Mac fonts are what are making Apple computers stand apart in terms of eye candy. I really love when I see Apple screencasts in Youtube, it looks like typing on them is a pleasure.
I absolutely agree in making Ubuntu easily recognizable.
Do we already have those fonts seen in the screenshots in Ubuntu 10.04?
Thanks,
Alex
Yes, I like this better. One thing I don’t like about the current theme is the strange color used to highlight buttons and other things. It stands out too much. This new theme makes highlighted widgets gel with the rest of the theme better.
hrm i like most of it – but I actually prefer the current window-buttons on lucid. well the signs on them anyway….
Themes are very nice, but there are some bugs. If there is a lot of items in menu, for example, in Internet and Sound & Video, the “indicator” what is highlighted, is not moveing smoothly and have some delay. And the other bug that I noticed is that there is no GDM theme in this.
User chooser in GDM is now the ugly gray one (it’s like you don’t have any theme installed).
Glad to see this maturing.
Progress bars still look too much like scrollbars. It feels too three-dimensional, like you can just grab it and move it around. Also, tests show that they should have a fast animation.
I like this redesign very much! It’s obvious that Cimi had a hand in this
I think you should take a look at the Faenza(someone already mentioned it) icon set. As it is, it works really well with this theme and with a bit of work I think it would give Ubuntu quite a bit of polish.
It’s very slow with transparent menus (other themes work perfectly)
Why is everything Orange ? I mean… why even the close button ?
Isn’t the orange highlight a little too bright ?
It’s very slow when scrolling over long menu list
not usable
Great improvement to default theme. Ever since 10.04 I’ve been using one of the default themes (depends on my mood). I tried adding murrine-daily repository.
Themes are spot on. Really nice to use, although I noticed that menu items are really slow but that is expected from daily build. Can’t wait for 10.10… thanks a bunch!
Why is it rounded corners always look so jagged in ubuntu/gnome? Can anything be done about that? Also the gnome-panels need padding badly, I can’t stand when icons are practically the height of the panel.
还行，但希望任务栏在以后的版本中改进一下。
Why do window buttons have a much bigger horizontal margin, compared to the much smaller vertical margin?
Why do window buttons have a much bigger horizontal margin, compared to the much smaller vertical margin?
(I hope I’m not about to duplicate a comment; previous attempts to submit gave me an error.)
Could you add more contrast, please? Contrast between text and background, widgets and background, selected and non-selected tab is definitely too low.
a huge implementation in the Ubuntu Gnome themes would be a better gnome-color-chooser .gnomecc compatibility – since early 90′s i loved the way we can apply colour schemes on Irix GUI objects, and would be awesome seeing this possible on these Ubuntu Metacity/GTK themes using gnome-color-chooser, and as well having this gnome-color-chooser available defaultly on the Ubuntu live-cd, or having their features implemented on the Ubuntu Gnome theme preferences. What do you all think?
The new refinements are a great improvement, however the one pixel gray color which serves as a window border makes the window appear to have jagged edges when there are contrasting light and dark colors in the background.
See the following image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26671354@N05/4877834348/
An alternative solution is to not use any window border at all, instead relying on the window’s own shadow effect to differentiate windows.
Great work!
New mouse set, please!
>>Brian Fleeger wrote,
>>
>>An alternative solution is to not use any window
>>border at all, instead relying on the window’s own
>>shadow effect to differentiate windows.
Agreed, similar to how Safari looks on OS X: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Safari_5_on_Mac_OS_X_10.6.png
The updated theme is cool overall, but I don’t think it’s up to the 10.04 themes yet, and I have some feedback on what I feel is weak about it. (And I’m strictly speaking about the standard Radiance theme.)
1. The active window in the window list (on the bottom panel) isn’t distinguished enough from non-active windows. You can’t just glance down at the bottom of your screen and know which window you have active, because the difference is so subtle. Maybe use some color on the active window tab down there.
2. Scrollbars are too small, like they might be hard mouse targets. And considering how relatively “big” things tend look in GNOME, their size makes them look a bit tacky.
3. The default dark text color (used on white backgrounds) is a little TOO light of a gray. It makes my Pidgin contacts list look as if everyone is idle. The minimize and maximize/restore buttons on active windows are probably a little too dark of a gray. (Someone already said previously that it makes them appear inactive, and I agree.)
4. I really liked the color of selected text from the old theme. It’s now a stronge orange as well, which doesn’t look as good to me. With the removal of that and the beige/brown/cream tints, this new theme feels a bit monotonous and plain – a “strictly orange and black” feel. It might have too much strong orange in it.
Thanks!
Really nice,
Good choice for the font.
The next LTS will be a masterpiece !
I have two questions :
Is there a plan to have a new cursor set ?
What is the font name ?
Finally, it looks GOOD!!!
As a designer, I was so miffed by the half-backed 10.04 interface which looked so amateurish. But now it finally looks like a cohesive, consistent product. Cannot wait for the new icons, when they happen (they DO need to happen). I have to say I have a preference for the light theme, but even the dark one looks excellent now. Good work, guys!
PS. I still think the window buttons should end up on the right-hand side though