I like the fact that you're proposing a visual update to a Linux distro. We need more "visual" people in this sphere, and more attention to aesthetics.
I like the general style you're aiming for. Though I'm worried that the green could be a little bit too intense for UI elements. Current accent color options on Mint are softer colors.
I don't like the logo. The lower square containing the L has waaay too much empty space in it, and the empty space is all concentrated on the superior-right side of the square, making it look very unbalanced. On the other hand, the square containing the M has little padding. These two things combined make the logo look unbalanced at two levels: one square with a lot of empty space vs one square with barely any empty space; the left square has all the empty space on one side of it.
Icons look great. However, what's going to happen when some application has an icon that doesn't adjust to your expectations of style and shape? Will it look good, or will it look very out of place? Mint's current answer to this is "we'll just make our own icons for every app", which I don't think is the right way to do it, for many reasons.
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.
I like the general style you're aiming for. Though I'm worried that the green could be a little bit too intense for UI elements. Current accent color options on Mint are softer colors.
I don't like the logo. The lower square containing the L has waaay too much empty space in it, and the empty space is all concentrated on the superior-right side of the square, making it look very unbalanced. On the other hand, the square containing the M has little padding. These two things combined make the logo look unbalanced at two levels: one square with a lot of empty space vs one square with barely any empty space; the left square has all the empty space on one side of it.
Icons look great. However, what's going to happen when some application has an icon that doesn't adjust to your expectations of style and shape? Will it look good, or will it look very out of place? Mint's current answer to this is "we'll just make our own icons for every app", which I don't think is the right way to do it, for many reasons.