As Andreas noted, at Guadec we discussed a couple of things about what we wanted to do with the various artwork in Gnome. One of the suggestions was to reduce the gnome-backgrounds module and provide a new default background instead. Jakub very kindly offered to take up the challenge and has come up with this first draft:
default-wallpaper-abstract.png (PNG Image, 1920 x 1200 pixels)
So the challenge is to try it out for a week and see if you still enjoy it at the end. Constructive and useful comments welcome.
Not sure yet what license this image will have, so please for the moment assume Copyright 2007 Jakub Steiner. Suggestions on what license would be most appropriate are welcome too.
Does it count if it makes me sick after 4-5 minutes of just looking at it? 😉
My brain does not react very well to the blueish-green color used in the bottom part. It makes me literally sick. 🙂
Already using it, already liking it.
Only criticism is that it reminds me a lot of the colors and style of Windows Vista.
Hi, my comments on that wallpaper :
Not neutral enough : there’s a bright side and a dark side. The bright side is far too bright. On my desktop, the dark side is where my clock & weather stuff are on the panel and this wallpaper makes this corner too dark. That dark side and the move implied by the bright parts create an unbalance that makes my eyes only watch the left side of the desktop. The good looking of it may depends on the GTK theme too, maybe rethink it related to the default GNOME desktop layout (default position of the panels) and theme?
hmm, I don’t like that too much 😉
does not really fit with my orange desktop 😀
the texture is okay-ish, the green color looks kind of weird. the dark gray colors of this website, mixed with the green link color of this website, would be better. or something blue-ish, but then I guess I’m a blue-ish type. isn’t gnome also a bit more blue-ish?
looks to much like it was taken from Vista
Vista
The green hurts, I mean, really, on my 20in monitor, it really hurts my eyes.
I also agree that it looks too much Vista 🙁
I’ve always found that a bluish tint looks better on GNOME.
What about a pure alpha-channel wallpaper upon a flat coloured desktop. Then it will be easy for the users to change the tint of their desktops keeping the wallpaper.
I second that, Luca. Gnome should ship with a pure alpha wallpaper. A lot of people probably don’t know you can use pure alpha wallpapers and it’ll get the feature noticed. Also no one can complain about the color because it can be whatever color you want. As for Jakub’s wallpaper. yeah it is kinda vista-y. But it also reminds me of a green version of ubuntu’s wallpaper, or of foresight’s wallpaper. Its just a generic gradient. Gnome deserves better. Something that should stand out from the crowd more.
I’m afriad i’ve got to agree with Patrys, it made me sick after about 2 mins 🙁 sorry.
Its really nice to see on this blog another person from PLD like Patrys. I also agree with him. It was looking horrible for me in small liferea small window, and much more worser in 1:1 scale, it hurts my eyes especially with my dark theme.
Jakub: I really love your artwork, for years I was using jimmac cursors(now Vanilla-DMZ), now im using Tango and tangoished GNOME icons, but this wallpaper is much more worser for me, than any other that was shipped with GNOME. It definetly should be some vector graphic (or translucent png), or sth that will utilize gtk colors. Cow and Clouds was wallpapers(maybe not really wallpaper) that was really neutral and good looking with every GTK theme and color scheme. And simple svg files dont take too much space, so I dont see any real reason(especially when allbody has >=120GB hdd for pr0n and warez 😉 to ship only one wallpaper, because theres not one that will fit evereybody.
Sorry for bugs, but I’m not native english speaker.
it suffers from the same problem as 90% of wallpapers out there: it is too bright overall, and because of http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457456 and http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317764, the icon text is really difficult to read.
I think this wallpaper needs usability work. You could also look at the Babaorum wallpaper suite, especially the dark blue one that I believe is the most balanced and less intrusive: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=48742
«Does it count if it makes me sick after 4-5 minutes of just looking at it?»
That’s not far from it here too. But I’m not sick, just disliking the blur style.
FYI I’m using no desktop icons at all, may be caused by this.
By the way, I just discovered Webilder.org, it seems to be the right answer for gnome wallpapers. May be you can try to integrate this into gnome. It will definitely fix the default wallpaper problem.
http://www.webilder.org/
Another thing, for people that want their personnal color on any background, it would be cool to include an alpha wallpaper, like this one from Andrea Cimitan:
http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/7593/backgroundalphapw9.png
I rather like it, although I’m not sure it fits with the clearlooks shade of gray. Goes more nicely with darker themes. Perhaps if the brightness were increased and the contrast decreased?
i would never use such wallpapper… with all respect to jimmac, i saw better wallpappers produced by him.
I think it’s too blurry in a way, there’s no particularity that makes you think you should have that instead of a colour gradient. It’d be nice to have sharper, or a sharper, feature(s) somewhere that makes it feel different.
This wallpaper is very nice, though I agree with jprieur: the left part is a bit bright, and my icons get somewhat lost there. Maybe Jimmac could balance the image in this respect.
Otherwise I find it original and not so much Vista-alike. Vista has “too perfect” backgrounds for my taste, and this one is more elegant and not so overdone.
Oh, and I like the green tones used: relaxing, nature-minded colors. Seems I like greens: my wallpaper is usually a single color, rgb 1,150,117.
Anyway it would be nice having two other versions, one in blue and another in earth tones (soil, sand) -too much work, I guess-.
I guess the GNOME marketing team should also have some input on this– i.e. what defines the GNOME ‘brand’, and how does the default background image help to project it? (N.B. This doesn’t mean I think it should have a dirty big GNOME logo on it!)
Of course, it should also look best in conjunction with our default theme, and for me personally it doesn’t really work on that level– I think the background colour somewhat overpowers the icons.
It really doesn’t look all that great, imho. I’m not sure why, but it’s not a very nice, calming backdrop.
I’m using the Gilouche GTK and Metacity themes, a clean desktop with no icons, and the Green Grass wallpaper from here: http://www.socksoff.co.uk/walls05.html.
(Fwiw, I think Green Grass would make an amazing default wallpaper if you could track down the author and get permission. 🙂 )