new direction for the wallpaper

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 09:30:58AM +0100, Martin Sourada wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-03-15 at 19:21 -0700, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> > Based on some feedback we've gotten about the beta wallpaper, I have a couple of approaches to suggest for moving forward, let me know which you think is the better approach:
> > 
> > 1) Islands - I saw the movie Mama Mia this weekend for the first time, and it's a movie based on a pretty Greek island. We did a survey a while back that indicated most people would prefer a landscape-based wallpaper, but maybe instead of going with mountains+temple wallpaper we could try a landscape based on the islands of Greece, e.g. maybe somewhat like this (higher res, and a bit cleaned up, no boat in the water and the land area here is a bit too busy, maybe replace it or clean it up):
> > 
> > http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnkarakatsanis/3334225599/sizes/l/
> > (Santorini Island Greece, by John.Karakatsanis CC-BY-SA)
> > 
> > 2) Mount Olympus - or instead we could take the temple out of the current wallpaper and focus a bit more wholly on the mountains as the symbol of Greece rather than the temple. We might need to swap Bob's photo out for an actual photo of Mount Olympus in this case though.
> > 
> > Let me know if you have any thoughts, or even better mockups / adequately-licensed reference or source photos .
> > 
> > Thanks
> > ~m
> > 
> Hm... I'd say get rid of the trees or make them just complimentary part
> of the wallpaper, drop the focus away from mountains and instead have it
> on the temple. As it is now, it's cool and I would not want much of the
> elements to go away, but as Matthias said, the wallpaper is focusing on
> too many elements at once.

That's not a bad idea if the desire is to reduce the number of
elements and simplify the background.  Maybe losing the birds would be
something to consider too.

All right, I'll put in a bit of critique here, noting that overall I
like the theme and the care which was put into it.

I confess, I am one of those people with a "messy Desktop" in the
computer sense.  (OK, you caught me, I have a messy desk in the
real-life sense too.  Oh, the shame!)  So I tend to hit problems with
icons and/or their labels clashing with backgrounds easily.  But I
wouldn't put myself out there as an "average" user, because I suspect
many people keep an emptier Desktop than I do.

I found that in my use case, the following elements tend to make it
more difficult to discern text labels on icons: (1) birds, (2) the
particular coloration and brightness of the sky, especially around the
middle third of the picture.  Interestingly, toward the bottom third
of the picture, even though that is where some people complain about
clutter, this problem goes away completely -- probably because the
picture's quite darker there, so the white text of the icon labels
shows up easier.

To be fair, this could also indicate that I need more or better
shadowing on icon text, so that it shows up well even on a
medium-bright background area.  That's not the Artwork team's problem
AFAICT, but I don't know an easy way of adjusting it.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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