[/caption]While some people might associate Lucid with Clarity or Lucid as in Lucid Dreams, the folks at Canonical, Ubuntu's sponsor, seem to be going a little overboard on the lightness metaphor.
Is Canonical creating a new generic "corporate identity" for Ubuntu inspired by light, as in Coke lite?
It had to happen I guess, what with the recent Canonical shake-up. IMHO the new thinner Ubuntu logo looks a lot like cheap corporate stationary and less like the fatter and blacker Linux distribution we all love.
Has Ubuntu as in " Linux for Human Beings" been put on a diet by designer Chris Jones Are we about to see NoFuntu Fanta -- Linux for Carbonated Soda Drinks? If Ubuntu is a soft-drink it really deserves more CO2 bubbles.
I don't get the reasoning by Jones for not being uniquely relevant anymore: "Ubuntu is six, we have to stop playing with our crayons and grow up" is a piece of schtick if ever I saw one. "Playing with Ubuntu" is precisely why people turn to Ubuntu as an alternative OS. Goodness, do we all now have to fit everything into an Oracle Office vision of the world, in which nothing but productive clones exist, without any life purpose except to go to work?
Whatever happened to being human? Or being African and wholesome? Both black and brown are being jettisoned, as we speak, in favour of outrageously unfashionable White and Orange.
Really now, the 1970s Orange Tang is so overdone as a design statement over the past decade, one might as well conceive of an OS from the Orange Free State or the former Transvaal. Think Cheesy as in sleazy. What next, fur on the desktop? Pimping Ubuntu is pretty sick, I guess. I really hope the folks at Canonical wake up before they forget: Ubuntu will always be a Community distribution based on Freedom, the four freedoms to be exact. Also Nelson Mandela's Principle Number 1. Which is why Orange is the one crayon you have to be careful with. Black, Grey, Red, anything but the Big O on its own. As for the typface, you heard write, it's a disaster from a monitor screen point of view, which is why I predict, those funky new letters will fatten up as practical issues such as visibility come into play.
Colours come and go, the typeface which made Ubuntu totally unique is an example of the playfulness in which the original design team appropriated pop-art with a style that will outlive today's horrible thinness. In six-months nobody will remember the exact point size of the redesign. They will remember only that it was thin as opposed to fat and that fat always comes back, no matter what diet you on.
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Alternative thin but still black choice"]
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Just to point out, neither Alan Pope nor Jono Bacon created those logos, the entire design was done by Canonical's design, after much research and discussion as to what would be coming next. After all, all logo's have to change sometime, otherwise Ubuntu would be left in the dirt!
ReplyDeleteA lot of negative criticism manifested because of the gloomy GDM background in Karmic. It actually inspired me to change it and boy was it easy. I even changed mine manually. That's the funny thing about Ubuntu, its about interaction with the community. As you probably guessed, I don't particularly like the new timid logo. Dirty is a lot better if it creates the kind of enthusiasm we have experienced around a single Linux Os. But if you really want to compare, it's too close to Mint and we losing something important in the process - FUN, PLAYFULNESS, FREEDOM
ReplyDeleteI've changed the captions - CHOICE not VERSION