Crafting of Lucidity 2.4 and the Future of Lucidity

Those of you who are here likely know that I am the creator of the GTK theme known as Lucidity. Those who have used it before version 2.4 may also know that it was originally a fork of a theme by the same name done by Issiah Heyer, and before that it was just a mockup which caught my attention. Since then, Lucidity has changed a lot and moved quite far from the original mockup and left all the code and buttons from Issiah Heyer's version behind as I slowly developed it with a look and feel of its own. Overall I want to keep Lucidity true to the name more than anything else, as in a theme which is very clean and smooth, and I shall cover how I aimed to improve that with the production of Lucidity 2.4 as well as point out some features people might enjoy.

One of the biggest changes in Lucidity 2.4 is the merging of elements from what used to be separate light and dark themes. As in, while the title bars used to be a light grey in the normal theme and everything was dark in the dark theme, I did away with the dark themes and instead Lucidity 2.4 has dark titlebars, menu and a dark panel. The reasoning behind this is to provide further clear contrast and distinction between a menu and a window. Along with this, a thin black border was added to the windows in order to give clear window boundaries for people not using shadows on their windows.

Due to Ubuntu's Unity turning the panel into the window title area complete with close, minimise and maximise buttons, the new window title and panel have the same gradient to provide a subtle sort of message along the lines of "this is now has the window controls. This also results in a nice fade in to applications such as Google Chrome, Firefox and Ubuntu One (along with application menus if not using Unity) which have dark backgrounds up top as seen in the screenshot to the right. Not only does this help illustrate the panel functioning as the title bar as well, it also looks nice and keeps with the smooth goal for the theme and also looks very clean.

The next big change is the addition of monochrome icons. However, in 2.4 final I removed some of the ones which were seen in the beta releases in favour of a more colourful desktop and a more minimal application of monochrome. I based which icons got a monochrome version on which icons are a flat colour in Ubuntu's Humanity icon set, and as a result they are now seen for navigation controls, magnification and a few other actions rather than being as rampant as the ones in the Faenza icon set. The idea is to only affect icons where the shape of the icon itself portrays the action well on its own without needing more colour or definition, and to keep the monochrome icons guiding the desktop experience but not defining it; leaving the rest up to whatever the user selects as the partner icon set (which is DanRabbit's elementary icon set in the screenshot).

Some smaller tweaks I made which help provide a nice new look but are not as apparent as the bigger colour changes and icon additions include lowering the contrast of buttons to give them smoother borders and fixing various parts of the dark themed areas such as giving scale sliders and the sound menu track controls a lighter black highlight instead of the bright white highlight of menu items that they had in the beta releases.

As for GNOME3/GTK3, I will be doing a GTK3 version shortly but I wanted to get Lucidity 2.4 finished first and to a point where I like everything about it before I start learning how to theme GTK3 to give a nice base for what I want it to look like in the end. However, Lucidity will be getting a GTK3 version in its next release and will be moving up to version 3.0 itself. I will be developing it in Ubuntu Oneiric and Fedora 15 virtual machines to ensure it looks good in both Unity and GNOME Shell, and intend to have it ready as soon as I feel it lives up to the quality of the GTK2 version.