On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 2:52 AM, Jehan Pags wrote:

Hi,

on various websites, you can see screenshots of GIMP with dark themes. Also I remember during LGM, it was said that GIMP at some point (2.10?) would be released with a dark theme as a default.

GIMP 3.0 when GIMP moves to GTK3. GTK3 comes with default both dark and bright themes. The GTK3 branch might be good a place to look..

Second question: the logics behind dark themes is apparently that they would be less a disturbance than a bright theme when you are working, if I remember LGM speech. Is that it? Is it better for the eyes too? I always thought that black on white was basically better for the eyes. Are there any actual studies explaining that dark UI are better for users, which would explain our switch to a darker default theme? Or is it all based on a feeling that dark themes are better?

A dark theme will sink further into the background, allowing the canvas and image to take a more prominent position. For GTK3 (and GNOME 3 apps) the choice of which theme will be appropriate is whether it is application focusing primarily on consuming or authoring visual content (image browser, editor, video player..) or not.

For visual content centric applications color appearance is important, by making the context of the work be subdued and dark - negative impact of simultaneous contrast in the human visual system will be reduced.

For text, the more paper like black on white might be preferable - though this would also depend on display technologies.. and viewing context.

/

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed
                                                 -- William Gibson
http://pippin.gimp.org/                            http://ffii.org/

On Sat, 2013-05-11 at 09:52 +0900, Jehan Pagès wrote:

Hi,

on various websites, you can see screenshots of GIMP with dark themes.

There are quite a few dark themes that work with gimp today, at least on Linux - I have not tried other platforms.

Any dark gtk+2 / gnome 2 theme for controls should work. I also use a monochrome icon theme.

I do find the dark theme and mono icons less distracting, especially when I use a dark theme for everything else on my screen.

Liam

Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Jehan Pags wrote:

Ok. I remembered for instance years ago, when everybody started to make their personal website with broken html, most were dark because it seemed cooler. Then it was told that dark websites are harder to use/read and finally are not that good for the eyes. And indeed now nearly all big websites use light colors. You don't see often website with a dark bakckground anymore, except those who are still on the "cool" design side rather than useful side for long-reading.

This is why I am wondering about this passage to dark themes for software UI now. Even though you work on visual content, you still have menu/tool texts, icons, information texts and boxes, etc. And if you stay on this UI for hours every day, I really wonder about the good or bad of light on dark background. Or else are all the web UI thoughts about not overusing dark backgrounds wrong?

Sorry, I don't get it. Are you saying that user interface elements are a long reading?

Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

On 05/11/2013 07:29 AM, Jehan Pagès wrote:

[ ... ]

This is why I am wondering about this passage to dark themes for software UI now. Even though you work on visual content, you still have menu/tool texts, icons, information texts and boxes, etc. And if you stay on this UI for hours every day, I really wonder about the good or bad of light on dark background. Or else are all the web UI thoughts about not overusing dark backgrounds wrong?

Our perception of color and brightness are powerfully altered by the color and brightness of adjacent regions. This well known optical illusion illustrates the principle:

http://tinyurl.com/ypux5

On a screen display, a gray background at about 50% brightness has the smallest relative impact on how we see a hypothetical "average" image displayed against it. The most important factor in this context is the canvas padding and window decorations that surround the image in progress; toolbox icons and such are far enough away that they only need a matching "dark theme" to reduce distraction if/as necessary.

One of the first things I do when setting up a GIMP installation is set a custom canvas padding color right in the middle of unsaturated gray. However, when working on images for web pages, I often reset the canvas padding to the background color of the page where the image will be displayed.

For reading text, I think black on white is nearly as hard on the eyes as white on black. The GIMP website design agrees with my information on this subject: In addition to the neutral gray background, the GIMP site's text boxes (div class "note") have a light, low saturation background color (#ddffcc) that is a little on the blue side of green. I generally use something even less saturated, for instance the background of the main container div on my text-heavy personal site is #f9ffff. This all goes back to studies done in the 1960s on workplace ergonomics; the hypothetical ideal background for reading black text was found to be somewhere around #cfe3de. I set a similar background color for text display areas in desktop themes. I do a lot of reading and typing, and it seems to reduce eyestrain.

We might take it for granted that "desktop wallpaper" is supposed to be very distracting i.e. artistic, humorous, etc. But here's one I made for purely practical reasons:

http://pilobilus.net/xfer/desktop-tile.jpg

It's a neutral gray texture that offers "zero distraction" and high contrast for anything on the desktop that is not itself black or gray, but provides a visually 'tactile' surface that makes the eye focus sharply on the plane of the screen.

:o)

Steve

On Sat, 2013-05-11 at 20:29 +0900, Jehan Pagès wrote:

Ok. I remembered for instance years ago, when everybody started to make their personal website with broken html, most were dark because it seemed cooler. Then it was told that dark websites are harder to use/read and finally are not that good for the eyes. And indeed now nearly all big websites use light colors.

The big search engines started to penalise dark sites, so it was a money issue.

The reason was that people would set the background to black in a paragraph or div element near the bottom of the page and have a whole bunch of search engine spam keywords in black on a black background that didn't show up.

The other problem was that before CSS was widely implemented you couldon't style forms very well, so the input fields would tend to end up white on a white background.

Actually if you use the "evolution" mail program you may still run into this with gtk styles in gnome 2, and also if you have a dark gtk theme you'll find logging in to ebay trickier than before.

In general, though, dark backgrounds are good for image processing. For text, for years ASCII terminals were made with green text on a black background to reduce eye fatigue - or possibly because it was cheaper, I'm not sure ;)

A lot of it will depend on your immediate environment, the brightness and contrast of your screen, viewing distance, and the amount of blood getting to your brain (drink water to help regulate blood pressure; take off shoes; sit upright; exercise...)

Liam

Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

If You accept making this thread slightly more offtopic i would appreciate any links to this studies on workplace ergonomics from 1960s.

Color of our environment affect colors in graphics we do. Any knowledge that help to use this fact consciously reduce need for trial and error.

Dominik

2013/5/11, Liam R E Quin :

On Sat, 2013-05-11 at 20:29 +0900, Jehan Pagès wrote:

Ok. I remembered for instance years ago, when everybody started to make their personal website with broken html, most were dark because it seemed cooler. Then it was told that dark websites are harder to use/read and finally are not that good for the eyes. And indeed now nearly all big websites use light colors.

The big search engines started to penalise dark sites, so it was a money issue.

The reason was that people would set the background to black in a paragraph or div element near the bottom of the page and have a whole bunch of search engine spam keywords in black on a black background that didn't show up.

The other problem was that before CSS was widely implemented you couldon't style forms very well, so the input fields would tend to end up white on a white background.

Actually if you use the "evolution" mail program you may still run into this with gtk styles in gnome 2, and also if you have a dark gtk theme you'll find logging in to ebay trickier than before.

In general, though, dark backgrounds are good for image processing. For text, for years ASCII terminals were made with green text on a black background to reduce eye fatigue - or possibly because it was cheaper, I'm not sure ;)

A lot of it will depend on your immediate environment, the brightness and contrast of your screen, viewing distance, and the amount of blood getting to your brain (drink water to help regulate blood pressure; take off shoes; sit upright; exercise...)

Liam

-- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

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