Just having some fun with a couple of mockups

[seversky]

I'm a UX Designer at a fairly large company, and also a Linux enthusiast. In my particular job I've had to design for some very restrictive size and bandwith limits, so the Tiny Core distro really piqued my interest. I felt a bit inspired to play around with some mockups to see just what this awesome little distro could look like within current its current limitations (assuming dev time were not an issue), and I wanted to share them here.

Feel free to disregard if this isn't interesting.

[seversky]

logo and icons

[seversky]

gui style: light

[seversky]

gui style: dark (low contrast)

[curaga]

They look pretty nice. Some notes based on my experience.

The single-color icons in the wbar mockup are hard to distinguish from each other. Try looking at them with your side eye, you can't tell them apart - this is a good way to simulate reduced vision. Even people with good vision, looking straight on, take longer to tell them apart, which reduces usability. You often have to use them by remembering their position, which is not what you want. Even some big-name apps fail in this point, some versions of 3ds Max have a dark theme where all the button icons are indistinguishable from each other, you have to highlight each one and wait for the tooltip to make any sense of it.

The lack of edges and guiding colors in some elements, the so called "flat design" that is in fashion, likewise reduces usability. In both the dark and light mockups, look at the search text field - you can't tell it's a text field or a background element. It doesn't look clickable, or text-enterable. The lack of borders in the scrollbar buttons makes them harder to hit.

FLTK is fairly easy to customize on colors, you can define what colors you'd like for all of its defaults in your .Xdefaults file. If the app overrides a color, then you'd need to edit the app's code. Other aspects of appearance would also need code changes.

[neonix]

I like all above screenshots. The only thing I don't like is Tiny Cole logo fonts. The icons are cool, but it will not fit with colorful icons of Firefox or Midnight Commander. But still I would like to see this theme, if not in main version than at least as a user flavor version. Would you be able to design bootsplash screen for Tiny Core? It would be cool if it was animated clock, and you can set how long it will move according to how fast your system boots up..