Project Aura (or, The future of gnome-themes)

One of the interesting comments I got from someone while I was manning the GNOME stand at LinuxWorld London a few weeks back, was that a lot of the themes that come with GNOME look very similar. I had a quick look and actually it’s true – if you look at Simple and Mist for example, the style of the appearance is very similar. With the move to cairo currently underway in gtk-engines, I have been wondering what to do about some of the older engines such as Crux and Lighthouseblue. Do we clean out gnome-themes and replace the old themes with fresh new ones, or do we revamp the old ones in a clean new style? Cleaning out themes would mean people upgrading would have all their old themes disappear, but it would give us more flexibility to do a really good job. On the other hand, revamping the current themes is probably a lot less work and more likely to get done quicker.

This sparked an interesting discussion in #marketing on irc.gnome.org about whether GNOME is fun for users, where Wanda inevitably got mentioned. I’ll write something about it some other time, but it is important that we make GNOME fun and exciting to use.

Andreas Nilsson has already mentioned to me the idea of doing a “kids” (see left) theme, using the icons from the gartoon icon theme, and some bright and bold colours he’s been working on. He has also come up with the suggestion for a ‘sports’ theme, which reminded me of the themes that used to come with Windows 98 or the Plus! pack for Windows 95. These are themes that to most of us (probably) as developers seem pointless, but they are just the sort of thing users love!

So, Luca has already sent an e-mail out to the gnome-themes-list, and I have replied with some more thoughts. However, we need as many people as possible to get involved in the discussion, so if you are interested about the future of themes in GNOME, sign up to the list and make your comments known!