zmaznevegor

Many thanks for your support. When we were preparing this, I was ready to get a lot of hate as Linux community is overly technicall and visually they don't really like change that much. That's why hearing support is very much appreciated by me and my team.

The reason why it looks sort of like Mac is:

- Sans fonts. But we wanted to keep fonts open-source, simple and versatile, so it can be easily used in different context and wouldn't require overcomplicated guidelines. Therefore, primary + secondary font structure is less efficient in this case due to a more complicated hierarchy maintenance in the future

- Simple logo. Same reason as the fonts - the more complicated it is, the harder it will be in maintenance and the more design resource it would require. I mean even current LM materials has 12 variations of the logo and it's a mess.

Stock people - I mean there are just two, if I don't count the login screen. The first one (with a logo on the back of a long sleeve) is there to show that logo can be used for the physical items as well. The second one in the interface is there to mainly show a profile UI but I think we should have went with a default icon (if the user keeps it blank) instead.

And you are totally right about how hard it is to push for the design solutions in OSS. We started this initiative in June LAST YEAR but soon found out that many people don't understand the whole reason for a brand redesign and don't see how brand creates a visual foundation. So then after some time, we decided that we need to create a brand concept to show specifically how brand creates a visual system, so it would be clear for the community and the devs why you can't start just with the website updates or UI/UX detached from the rest.

And indeed most of the negative feedback right now can be grouped into unwilling to change or tech people preferences.

When we think of Linux Mint though, in it's core it is about being more user-centric and friendly than other Linux distros. This also means that you need to be very beginner friendly - that's why Cinnamon is so Window-like in the first place. Both of these things mean that from a visual standpoint it can't allow itself to be technical and shouldn't follow aesthetics preferred by most of the tech crowd (and I mean why if we have Arch, Manjaro, Debian, etc. for really advanced users who don't care about the GUI). It also means that it needs to be willing to change cause users preferences grow, interface assumptions slowly change with our devices and products we use. And it should be simple for the easy maintenance (but I talked about this one already).

Huge thanks for the great feed back, really appreciate it.

Regarding the UI colours and icons - we wanted to show overall how the brand creates a visual foundation for the rest of the syste. This is something that is a standard in other fields ofc, but due to the lack of designers (and especially non-technical ones) in oss, this step is often gets missed. Therefore, the whole concept basically tries to show why current visual brand limits the whole system. This being said, both UI and icons are non-final and are mainly for presentation purposes.

For the icon matter the best thing would be to: - introduce some basic guides that can be easily followed by community and app developers - create an icon basis (like first 100 icons for the default icon pack) - introduce some automatic icon switch. For some icons these guides can be applied automatically with adjusted padding and sizing.

Regarding the logo we always need to think of: - how dynamic we want it to be - context defined

I noticed that frequent criticism so far was about logo either feeling imbalanced or being too simple. First of all it is not imbalanced technically, but it is indeed built this way that creates stronger visual dynamic than something more standard like git logo. Coming back to logo simplicity - we need this for a higher brand versatility, at the same time keeping it efficient. The more complicated the logo, the more time it would take to adapt it to various contexts (and sometimes the higher skill it requires). For community-maintained system having a complicated logo would make no sense cause it would just create hours and hours of extra work and design blockers in the future.

But i use Linux myself :)

Thanks!

Many thanks! Trying to push an initiative for some time but decided that a concept speaks better than anything else. Hope Clem and team considers it