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
93 Responseshide comments
I don’t really know if you want feedbacks at this point of development, anyway… I really like it, but:
1. The minimize and maximize buttons are a bit too dark in the active window
2. The disabled entries in a menu are very hard to read
3. The tick in small checkboxes (e.g. the ones in Startup Applications > Startup Programs) seems to be different from the one in larger checkboxes, the first one is dove gray, the latter (I prefer this one) is nutmeg.
4. The scrollbars look awesome, but they might be a tad too small.
5. The trough behind the window buttons is so subtle it makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be better to remove it entirely; it would be also more consistent because right now, when there is only the close button, no trough is shown. Screenshot with and without the trough (I just replace trough_{left,middle,right} with an empty png): http://i.imgur.com/entMq.png
Overall is much better than the previous theme, nice work!
I’d agree that in general this is a great improvement. The big usability problem I’ve noticed so far is that disabled menu items are practically illegible because their is so little contrast between the dark text and the darker background. For user interface discoverability the disabled items need to be readable.
Why doesn’t someone from Canonical answer in this post?
It’s a nice refinment, and I’d love to see more, much more of it.
It’s hard to see with a dark background, but is the AA on the window borders fixes? Those look so hard and pixel-y with a bright background.
Also, the menu drop down has hard edges, which breaks up the form of the upper level (rounded) and the overall rounded human form factor.
Hi, I think that scroll bars and progress bars are a bit too thin, if my opinion can be of any use. Anyway, I really believe that some effort should go in harmonizing the GTK+ theme with non-GTK+ applications theme: OpenOffice.org and Firefox should get some attention, being two of most important applications in the distribution. I know that theming possibilities are limited, it would be nice to have a more consistent look.
Looks really good!
Some critism though:
Its not visible on the screenshots, but i think toolbars like in nautilus need a decent gradient. they currently look too solid. Also the window buttons look too dark, and so does the background color of the window.
I would like to have system-tools and preferences organized like mandriva, pclinuxos, etc…
Where can we report bugs about this new theme?
Those jaggy metacity borders will ruin everything…
The theme looks gorgeous, I’ve happily switched to it! There are some small things to be adjusted, but people have already commented on every aspect so I won’t.. ;P
Regarding the AA on window decoration borders: what about using the metacity theme v2 specification? It would allow to define the roundness of the borders (for example rounded_top_left=”2″ etc), so that the corners would be less rounded but at least not so pixelated.
(an example of such a metacity theme is Unified: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Unified?content=121728 , I can modify the current Ambiance if somebody is interested)
the new theme looks awesome!!! congratulations. I just have an advise. I guess that equinox engine looks a little better for the window’s side panel. it’s something more like mac style.
El nuevo tema se ve sorprendente!!! felicitaciones. Solo tengo un consejo. Creo que el motor equinox luce un poco mejor en el panel lateral de las ventanas. Es un poco mas como el estilo de mac.
This is ridiculous. Reduce the default height of menu entries. This is a joke. Running stock ubuntu on 1280×800 causes those menus to scroll. Are you freaking kidding me?
I make a little modification to the new Ambiance. Gimme your opinion.
1. Wide tabs (without left-right borders)
http://i34.tinypic.com/10miy9z.png
2. Only top line tab (with buttons more integrated in the UI)
http://i37.tinypic.com/30thyt3.png
I’ve been using the new theme for about 30 minutes and I think I’m absolutely in love with it, except for one thing. Maximized windows look pretty bad next to the top panel, there’s too little separation and the gradients just run into each other. I don’t know the best way to solve this, but while piecing together a theme of my own, I really liked using the Radiance panel background with an otherwise Ambiance-inspired theme: http://yfrog.com/n1desk1001p (This was a work in progress at the time, hence the white text color on panel, but it illustrates what I mean by separating the panel from the window border.)
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 (this is a case with my desktop), the “indicator” that is highlighting, 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).
I echo the thoughts that the selected app is not clear enough on the bottom panel. I can’t tell at a glance which app is active.
Well done! and…Faenza Icons FTW!
I’d like to have, if possible, the background color used in gnome-appearance to highlight the image used as desktop background with rounded corners and so on with all the apps using that gtk widget. It would be very nice.
P.S. I love that checkboxes!!
Suggestion: make versions in purple, blue, green, pink, not only orange color. \:
Thx
I’ve been using the new beta theme for 15 minutes and already my eyes are burning from straining to look at the text. It is just too light of a grey. I hope it will be fixed as I’m not the only one to comment on the text colour.
if people want more gnome-color-chooser compatibility (specially on Metacity), here are some hacks: http://pastebin.org/475329
It would be great to have a response on the issues raised by the comments, or better yet, a place where to file bugs.
The new theme looks way better than the old one, it’s something I’d actually keep
One thing that should be changed though is that rounded border on the bottom of every window. This screenshot shows what I’m talking about: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_FJH0hYZmVtc/TF6qOnVmPqI/AAAAAAAAJNk/Kd6pl0S_ZQA/s1600/Screenshot-dark.png
I realize that it’s a bug in that shot that’s causing it to not be the same color as the rest of the window, but I think it would look way better if it was just removed entirely.
I found another couple of “bugs”:
1. Objects selected in an inactive window are hard to discern from unselected ones; e.g. select few files in a nautilus window in list view mode, then select another windows. Can you easily tell which ones are selected? Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/20EOv.png
2. I use a custom format in the clock applet, for some reason with this theme the text looks fuzzy, while it wasn’t the case with the default theme in Lucid. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/qtwz3.png
Since many complained about the dark minimize/maximize buttons, I modified them a bit: http://i.imgur.com/Z1Osk.png
I hope I’m not wasting my (and your) time posting all this stuff in the wrong place.
TO EVERYONE GETTING AN _UGLY GDM THEME_ AFTER INSTALLING THESE UPDATED PACKAGES … DO THE FOLLOWING TO FIX IT:
omit the single quotes below …
hit ‘Alt+f2′ then type ‘gconf-editor’
Navigate to ‘/desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme’
Highlight and right click ‘gtk_theme’
Click ‘Set as Default’
Also next to gtk_theme it should say ‘Ambiance-maverick-beta’.
Logout and gdm theme should now be the Ambiance-maverick beta theme.
i like the new improvements, I don’t like something; why the menus need to have the same color of the panel? that always bothers me and that’s the reason why I like more Radiance than Ambiance, i don’t like dark menus too.
in my opinion another thing that need to be completely changed is the Icon theme is so ugly, is one of the first things that i change after installing ubuntu. apart from that everything looks more attractive
i like the new improvements, I don’t like something; why the menus need to have the same color of the panel? that always bothers me and that’s the reason why I like more Radiance than Ambiance, i don’t like dark menus too.
in my opinion another thing that need to be completely changed is the Icon theme is so ugly, is one of the first things that i change after installing ubuntu. apart from that everything looks more attractive.
It lags, even on a beefy workstation. Please don’t break the tradition of having a faster system each successive release.
Also, I don’t like the reduced margins or icon size in the menus because it makes them look more crowded. Upon first access of a menu, you can even see the items “creep together” after they’ve been drawn already.
I’d favor larger icons in the Applications menu, and highlighting recently used entries. I tried enlarging the icons myself, but there were way too many abstraction layers to make sense of loading the right icon.
Anyway, I’ve tried teaching elder people to use Gnome and they have a hard time recognising icons and reading a menu top to bottom. Larger icons would help because they’d be easier to spot and point to with the low precision they have when handling the mouse.
Finally some serious theming. It will help a lot to new Ubuntu users !
Lo que más me gusta del nuevo aspecto, es el aspecto que queda el Chrome, ese color naranja le queda de muerte. Sinceramente, creo que este paso que a dado el nuevo tema es muy grande (creo que incluso mayor que el de Ubuntu 10.04 el cual no me gustó mucho, por que parecía un Alpha de lo que estamos viendo ahora)
Muy buen trabajo señores
i like the new theme but dislike the window buttons (close etc) the 10.04 version is far better. Why changing it AGAIN, use it of about a year of two, why changing all the time? And make a blue version also I like that one (on Gnome-look.org)
)
example…screenshot… (i use it now with blue Faenza icons and the selected items are also blue as the close button, supper desktop
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/dom+desk?content=128842
geep up the good work to make Ubuntu beautiful but replace the buttons with the old ones
Theme is nice, but black menus are unprofessional. If you choose to have default dark theme and menus will be black, it would be full of bugs in many applications. Dark theme cannot be default, unless to want to stay amateurish..
Ok, people let me clarify few things for you.
1. Ubuntu designers have LIMITED time, and making 5 different themes is just not an option. If you take a look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickReleaseSchedule you’ll see that UserInterface freeze is 26th august. Which means, two days from time this post was written.
2. Window buttons are located on the left side because Ubuntu 10.10 should bring in new stuff to the table, called WIndicators. The idea is to make the same mechanism for application indicators (sound, messaging menu, etc.) work on per-window basis. And yes, it will be located on the right side of the title bar. http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333
3. Neither menu items nor window buttons should be made smaller. Interface options NEED to be large enough. There’s something called Fitt’s law (more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law). In short it’s a mathematical representation of interface usability. All in all SMALL = HARDER TO USE. No matter if it looks a bit too big or wide, you’ll grow to like it because it’s easier to use.
Just have some faith in Ubuntu Team. No matter how much time they need, they always manage to improve Linux a bit more and make it even prettier.
I love the new theme, it’s so detailed! I don’t like the wallpaper, but a new wallpaper is just a click away!
You guys really outdid yourselves with this theme. Attractive and very professional. A real pleasure to use.
It’s elegant and beautiful. Very professional, thanks for your work.
非常好！感谢！
Not to complain or anything,, but if you’re working on these themes, shouldn’t you start with the obvious usability issues? I’m sure there are a few, but what comes first to my mind is the 1 pixel window borders that make resizing windows much more difficult than it ever should be.
The new Radiance is ugly
I preffer Ubuntu 10.04 light themes. Any way to install it again?
A short feedback: I like the theme. But there is one thing that bothers me: resizing the gnome-panel to more than 24 pixels is just ugly since the texture does not grow as well.
Hello adoa, I hit the non-scaling of the background texture under the gnome-panel yesterday when bumping up the DPI resolution. It is bug #532309 in Launchpad.
its great
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