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Not
having a coherent and consistent design system has been a big
problem for LibreOffice Community. But a branding guideline could
help to fill the empty room. At least with a brand guideline, I can
be grateful that our products are not designed carelessly.
Talking
about branding, TDF as the organization behind LibreOffice is not too
strict in terms of technical implementation. In fact, LibreOffice has
always carried the vision of having an interface that blends with the
operating system. Something that sounds very familiar to the FLOSS
desktop world. With this kind of vision, it feels like the brand's
approach to many design elements - like the interface, for example -
on the proprietary operating system becomes a bit strange in my
opinion. Obviously, in the world of Windows and macOS, applications
usually have their own unique design characteristics without even
trying to pretend to be part of the operating system. For example,
Microsoft Office, the 2007 version does not have the same interface
approach (except maybe the Office button which looks like the Windows
Start button) with the Windows XP and Windows Vista interfaces. MS
2010 is the same, even though MS 2013 both adopted a flat appearance
like the era of Windows 8 and 8.1 but in terms of interface even
icons and background knick-knacks in their windows are different. MS
Office 2019 and 365 actually use an interface that has no resemblance
to Windows 10 at all (except for the flat part which is
trending).
The same is true for the macOS version of MS
Office, each version no one really wants to appear like Finder.
Before the era of MS Office 2019/365, the skeuomorphism
characteristics were indeed maintained, but we can easily say that MS
Office looks like MS Office completely.
In
contrast to LibreOffice, which until now still wants to carry its
FLOSS vision so that it looks like a Win32 application using a flat
"skin". Fortunately the Colibre is quite helpful for
Windows environment.
OK back to branding. After
three years ago, the elementary icon theme was getting quite a massive
update. I just realized one thing, it turned out that the icons I
made used a color that I had taken out of nowhere. To be sure, I
utilized some of the previous elementary icon colors and the rest
from the Internet. Arriving at one of the bug report Heiko Tietze
gave me a link to the elementary OS branding page which immediately
got my attention:
|
Sweety Color Naming Scheme |
I immediately realized that elementaryOS
has been providing a collection of brand colors that have very unique
and interesting names since when. Notice, to name a bunch of yellows
they use the word "banana", for the purple they use the
word "grapes". What a clever and very intriguing naming.
Without saying what color people should have imagined the color in
question. Something LibreOffice should adopt.
Here come
one example of random color choices:
Why does the line chart have a lighter green color
than the plus sign on the Insert Image icon?
Apart
from that, there were many icons that turned out to be unsatisfied in
my eye. Like suppose the shape is not elementaryi-ish, for example
the Navigator icon: Look at the flat red white needle (or what
anything you can say) in the center. Flat is not elementary
characteristic!
or the confusing choice of color pairs:
Why did I choose this blue and purple? Was it
just because the blue export icon and purple import upstream? Yes, it
is true, but from a usability point of view it is not very useful but
it actually makes it lame.
In addition, there is also a
color selection that makes it even more confusing. Please look at the
green color in the table header below and take a look at the icons
for inserting those columns and rows in the first left group:
Especially when the size is small like this
The use of orange in the selected table, column and
row above is also very unsightly.
After all, there are a
number of updates already occurring on this elementary upstream.
Suppose this
and this.
So, the current icon theme is a bit less relevant.
So,
some time ago I decided to massively update the elementary icon theme
back and here is the result.
tdf#139219:
Proposal to remove green header row part in table icon:
tdf#139048: Update Pencil Element to Be Yellow
tdf#139020:
Proposal to Revert All Blue-Violet Color Arrow Pair to One Coherent
Color
also, many icon with multiple line elements are now thicker even for small size
Other updates:
Save icon now use red indicator instead of arrow's shape color change to indicate an unsaved work
New Macro icons
New Indexes and Tables (e.g. for Table of Contents) icons:
New Track Change icons
New Navigator icons
New Thesaurus icons
New Show Draw Functions icons
New Image Color icons
New zoom slider and Writer's status bar icons
Background fill color icons are now using more balance size
Per module view:
Writer:
Calc
As
this blog post written, 7.1 has been released. Not all above updates
has successfully landed in 7.1.0, but I am sure everything are landed
in 7.1.1 version, much less the master version.
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