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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: