Archives: Customization
I've always loved art deco design, for the angular shapes and the sharp contrasts, but most of all for the colors. They seem unique to me in any art movement of the 20th century. Last time I did this whole thing, I just started with a hazy vagueness (which turned out ok, surprisingly!), but this time I started with a famous painting by Tamara de Lempicka called "Young Girl with Gloves." From there I had to work backwards towards something that would actually make a usable interface. Ain't that just always the way.
After resisting the temptation to make another dark, "inverse" theme (it's always there with me, especially in the middle of the night), I went with a fairly neutral palette, the base color having perhaps a half-hint of green, but mainly a medium-light grey, highlighted with gold and black.
Now, a word about "gold." I always thought it was a color. I was surprised and possibly enlightened to discover that... it's not. Red and green and blue are colors, they happen all on their own and stand firm in any light, but something like "gold" is so dependent on the colors near to it, and perhaps even the shapes and context it's put into, that it can't be called a color anymore than you can call "puke" a color. Gold is an emotion, and at its very best it's an event. If that sounds obvious, well, it does to me too, now that I see it. Ain't that just always the way.
Aaaanyway. The icons are very different than the ones in the last theme I put out, even though they're based on the same basic stuff. The folders (very dominant in any desktop's color scheme) are a lipstick shade of rose, and many of the basic colors of other icons have been changed, enhanced, or the icons completely redrawn and reworked.
Before you install any of this, make sure you have the latest gnome themes:
Do that first, and the "themes" package should drag and drop nicely. The icons should install just as easily, the wallpaper as always is at your discretion, and the login theme (labelled "Deco-gdm-login.tar.gz") should be extracted and moved by the root user to /usr/share/gdm/themes.
And then (I have found no way to make this one-step, unfortunately), you have to go to System > Administration > Login Window, choose the "Local" tab, then choose the theme that you just plopped into the "/usr/share/gdm/themes" folder. The theme ought to show up immediately, even without restarting or logging out. (If it doesn't show up, try restarting or logging out. Heh.) Make sure you also choose "Themed" and "Selected Only" from the two dropdown menus at the top of the window, respectively. The process is not as pretty as it should be, I know. But if it was, it would be called Apple and it wouldn't be free. It also wouldn't be this customizable, so it's kind of a wash.
Anyway, here you go.
 Screenshot 1 |
 Screenshot 2 |
 Sample: Icons |
Download
Posted by SoGlitchy at 7:04 AM | Link | Comments (0)
Wallpaper: "Have to"
July 22, 2008 | Posted by SoGlitchy at 2:04 AM
Ahem. Presented with all due apologies to Veer and the fine artists who keep me going back there. This began life as a wallpaper of theirs that proclaims, "You have to disconnect to reconnect," which sounds like an Oblique Strategy, except lame. (You're required to sign up for an account to download wallpapers from them, but of course that's free.)
At any rate, I believe I found the hidden message in it.
Note: This is only in 1440x900 size (png pr jpg) instead of the usual range of sizes. I'm not going to go all-out for a goof. :)
Posted by SoGlitchy at 2:04 AM | Link | Comments (2)
Another of my little hobbies is redesigning the theme of my desktop PC, which is running a flavor of Ubuntu. Switching to a GNU/Linux operating system has been a huge eye opener for me on the customization front. While Mac offers a few great tools for tweaking things like icons and the dock, and Windows has a lot of options and plugins, nothing offers the hands-on constructive frustration of Linux. You can change the look and feel of anything, quite literally, and usually without breaking anything too mission-critical in the process. It has its problems and limitations (say "X-server" to any Linux geek, and you'll get a saturnine nod), but on the whole, the fun to be had playing with it far outweighs the bad times.
The theme I'm calling StudioJade (so named because it's based on a few UbuntuStudio theme elements, and of course because it's a jade-ish color) began life as a Winamp skin, was discovered by me as a skin for Audacious, and I've been kicking it around, abandoning and coming back to it, ever since. I've taken pains to try to avoid the pitfalls of dark or inverse-colored themes, like magical disappearing text, or areas with too much or too little contrast. It has been revised within an inch of its little green life, but I have based all of my revisions and improvements on what I have discovered by doing what I do with my machine (web browsing, word processing, web development, graphics, and music editing). Maybe it goes without saying, but your mileage may vary.
Also, different screens will do different fancy and terrible things with color, and laptop screens are notoriously bad with dark colored-themes, in part because of the nature of LCD displays themselves, and in part because of how often people look at their laptop screen from an oblique angle or in bright light. This theme may still work for your laptop, but that's not what I had in mind. Like almost every designer I know, I spend a lot of time up at all hours of the night, sitting in a darkened room, staring intently at a monitor for hours at a time. Too much white is hard on the eyeballs after a while, and too much contrast is almost worse -- you can't look at straight-up white-on-black any longer or more comfortably. So there is a need to mellow things, turn the lights down on everything, and let your retinas know that it's all going to be ok.
First a note: this theme will work fine on any variant of Gnome Ubuntu (the "regular" version, if you will), but if you want your window titlebars to look like the ones you see in the screenshots, you'll need the UbuntuStudio theme, which you can get from the universe repository without the software suite or kernel by typing
The theme also comes with a much more groovy bootsplash screen and a better set of sounds than the default Ubuntu installation. (Take it from one who has learned the hard way, though: don't try to install the whole UbuntuStudio package unless you have a pretty serious machine. A slower PC will choke on it in no small way.) So, without further adieu.
As you can see, the "Jade" package includes the GTK-2.0 basic theme, which is really most of the hoopla, and a set of icons, which are basically the UbuntuStudio icons with different folders. Both of these can be installed through the usual channels: System > Preferences > Appearance > Theme tab. (Remember, install the whole tar.gz archive package. Dont untar it first.) There are some wallpapers, which you can do whatever you feel like with. And the "Complete package" also includes a gdm login screen theme, which can be installed with the Login manager (System > Administration > Login window).
Enjoy, and there's more on the way soon.
Posted by SoGlitchy at 7:06 AM | Link | Comments (0)
Wallpaper: "You."
June 29, 2008 | Posted by SoGlitchy at 12:35 PM
If it's true that, as the saying goes, "a writer always writes," then I guess it's equally true that a designer always designs. I don't take days off from sitting at a computer and messing around to make things prettier. Doesn't even occur to me. When I'm stressed or bored or, in the case of this week in Chicago, overheated, I just downshift a bit and mess around with something that doesn't matter to anyone but me. Desktop wallpaper is perfect for that.
This pretty lady has a message of some kind. Perhaps you have been chosen for some gravely important task, or maybe you need a stern reminder of who's untimately responsible for something. (For instance, you.) In any case, the object of her attention is unmistakable.
Detail
Widescreen
2560 x 1600 -- .jpg (439k) | .png (999k)
1920 x 1200 -- .jpg (285k) | .png (664k)
1680 x 1050 -- .jpg (225k) | .png (528k)
1440 x 900 -- .jpg (187k) | .png (439k)
Standard
1600 x 1280 -- .jpg (332k) | .png (763k)
1280 x 1024 -- .jpg (183k) | .png (425k)
1024 x 768 -- .jpg (122k) | .png (286k)
iPhone
320 x 480 -- .jpg (49k) | .png (106k)
Posted by SoGlitchy at 12:35 PM | Link | Comments (0)