Just stumpled upon this article.
It’s good to get a fresh view from someone outside the community. We can do a lot better. A lot of us look at our desktop every day and get used to bad use of whitespace all over the space or simply don’t have the time to report bugs (I usually see a couple of these issues in every GNOME application).
Whitespace, alignments and add to the satisfaction of using software. It’s like the polish on a sports car. Not only is it nicer to look at, it also increases readability and order in your application, and thus usability.
If you have questions or need help on how to use whitespace in your application, please visit #gnome-design on irc.gnome.org.
And please stop calling it a desktop. It’s an antiquated term, that provides a conservative view upon the technology, and holds back getting developers to look beyond the classic system, and create something better.
We have the technology. We have the people. Unfortunately, most of them are quite conservative about the software they’re most passionate about.
Thanks for the link, Hylke!
That’s something I have been babbling about, too. It’s more than just white space, though: it’s how you use contrast to convey meaning.
Right now, Gnome has an incredibly awful obsession with lines. For an example, check out Appearance Preferences with any GTK theme. (Especially Clearlooks!). Count the number of heavy lines going left to right before you reach the actual content.
It’s quite sickening, really. Thankfully, as far as I can tell it can be fixed within theme engines. They just need to be more aggressive with what they do.
The crowded sidebar in Nautilus is another example. Applications are using lines, lines, lines as a cheap shortcut instead of meaningfully separating content. It doesn’t work! It looks ugly and it makes noise.
I was meaning to make some before / after mockups pointing this out. Maybe I will now