> "We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface."
It always seems to be new-age mumbo jumbo with these sort of design people. Design needs to be given back over to the engineers again. I know that suggesting is going to draw ridicule; it's easy and popular to point to the worst engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the design abilities of all engineers. But form needs to be balanced with function and these artsy new-age designers who justify everything they do with faux-poetic metaphors have been a disaster. There needs to be balance.
Engineers can be taught the pragmatic virtue of interfaces designed for common people. Using standardized widgets and guidelines, engineers are perfectly capable of creating interfaces that are intuitive to users, even if they don't satisfy the dedicated designer's sense of aesthetics. Just look at the GUI libraries from the 90s and compare it with the dumpster fire of modern interfaces. In the 90s an engineer designing an interface would use a button widget and the button would look like a button. Today designers make everything look sleek and special to leave their artistic mark and I am left with no fucking clue what I can even click.
Design needs to be given back over to the engineers again.
No, no, then you get the open source approach:
In case the desktop shortcut for your application is not available with the /usr/share/applications/ directory you have and option to create the Desktop launcher manually. In this example we will create and Desktop application shortcut for Skype application. Obtain the following information for any given application you wish to create shortcut for. Below you can find an example:
To obtain a full path to executable binary of any program use the which command eg.:
$ which skype
/snap/bin/skype
In regards to the application icon, the choice is yours. You can either head over to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ directory and search for any relevant icon to use, or simply download new icon from the web. Now that we have all the necessary information, create a new file Skype.desktop within ~/Desktop directory using your favourite text editor and paste the following lines as part of the file’s content. Change the code where necessary to fit your application specific details.
Yeah yeah, typical. "it's easy and popular to point to the worst engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the design abilities of all engineers."
The general dysfunction of open source design is much broader than UI design and has little to do with engineers in general being incapable of good UI design. You might as well linux bluetooth woes to claim that engineers shouldn't be allowed to write device drivers. Whether it's designing a GUI, an API, or any other system, there will be some engineers who are good at it an others who suck. To get good design of any sort out of engineers you need an organizational structure that promotes talent and weeds out the hacks. The open source scene broadly lacks such structure and struggles to do this.
What you're talking about is a deficiency with community driven model of development, not a general deficiency of all engineers. Put 20 random chefs into a kitchen with no organizational structure imposed on them and your restaurant will be a disaster. But using that to claim chefs can't run a restaurant is absurd.
It always seems to be new-age mumbo jumbo with these sort of design people. Design needs to be given back over to the engineers again. I know that suggesting is going to draw ridicule; it's easy and popular to point to the worst engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the design abilities of all engineers. But form needs to be balanced with function and these artsy new-age designers who justify everything they do with faux-poetic metaphors have been a disaster. There needs to be balance.
Engineers can be taught the pragmatic virtue of interfaces designed for common people. Using standardized widgets and guidelines, engineers are perfectly capable of creating interfaces that are intuitive to users, even if they don't satisfy the dedicated designer's sense of aesthetics. Just look at the GUI libraries from the 90s and compare it with the dumpster fire of modern interfaces. In the 90s an engineer designing an interface would use a button widget and the button would look like a button. Today designers make everything look sleek and special to leave their artistic mark and I am left with no fucking clue what I can even click.