Note: although I purposely posted this article on April 1st, this is not an April fool. It’s a collection of quotes from a mailing list discussion. So there’s a chance things will really happen if the project gets pursued.
[this post contains excerpts from a mailing-list discussion about Karmic Koala release - citations from too many users to be listed by your lazy blogger 
]
Let’s get rid of competition with a feminine theme. Ubuntu community is brainstorming about the chance to ship a feminine theme with Ubuntu.
A theme that..
would make a typical western women feel comfortable and
special, like she was using a computer designed for her.
A theme that…
has a distinctly feminine
appeal. I’m not suggesting eye-burning pink (like is included in XP),
but choosing a human related palette that says to women, “This is for
you.”
It’s not that easy though:
Hmm. It’s hard to know in how far gender specific color preferences are
cultural or biological.
Especially about the big thing: which colors to choose ?
For what it’s worth: in Belgium this depends form city to city. Where I grew up babies are dressed in pink if they’re boys and blue if they’re girls. Though due to American influences such as the Barbie dolls pink is generally considered to be for girls.
The aim is to ship it by default:
I am an optimist so I will say that the end-game is to ship with
Ubuntu.
Notwithstanding big impediments such as:
I will never understand women, I will not even try.
So here we go, Shuttleworth’s announce getting real: Karmic Koala will
have a designer’s fingerprints all over it
What do you think ?
A feminine theme is a good idea imho.
I showed this to the people in #linuxchix, and, well, we’re confused.
Chrysler tried this back in the 1950’s. Somehow they got the idea that painting a car pink would make it appealing to women. Didn’t work of course. Then decades later, Honda (a company that employed many women) and others figured out that to sell cars to women those cars needed to be USEFUL to women. So they added useful functions like adjustable seatbelt anchors and lower dashboards and cupholders and doors that are easier to open and close.
My point here is that women are not as shallow as we men always assume. You can’t fool them with pretty colors. But make a product that women find useful and they will beat down your door. Which brings me to the real point – get more women involved in designing and building the product and you will have something that appeals to women.
@Hunter: a theme is about appearing more than anything other. To be useful you should work on the system itself.
You are making a wonderful point, anyway, what could make Ubuntu more useful to a woman ?
Imho, it’s a bad question, because its target is too broad.
Actually, this makes some good marketing sense. Women are among the harder market segments to reach with technology products, and they are the ones most likely to view GNU/Linux as “not for them” (because it has the reputation of being for geeks/gearheads which in turn are stereotypically un-feminine — and yes I said “stereotypically” advisedly). Targeting women will gain more attention while having very little impact on men, who are unlikely to think the default theme is that important (if you’re not manly enough to change the theme on your computer, what does that say about your machismo?
).
Women who are not yet comfortable with the technology (and this is still very common, since computers continue to be seen as rather un-feminine), are the ones who would be least inclined to change the theme. Having it suit them “out of the box”, therefore, makes sense.
As for the already-sold tech-savvy women out there? I’ve never met one who wouldn’t think a metallic pink computer wasn’t cool (even if they don’t want one for themselves), but more importantly, they are in the same situation as tech-savvy men: they’ll be perfectly willing to change the theme. (IOW, Mackenzie: I don’t think Linuxchix are the real target of this sort of thing — it’s more about people like my Mom who do use computers but don’t want to go beyond that, or about high school girls for whom computers take a back seat to Twilight and boys. Making a GNU/Linux system look cool and feminine might entice them to take an interest they otherwise wouldn’t consider).
As for colors, I can strongly recommend paying attention to existing marketing directed at women. Look at the colors Target prefers (other than red & white, I mean — but overall, they are marketed towards women). Look at the colors of shampoo and other beauty product packages. The people who design those packages have spent years trying to figure out what appeals to women, and there’s no reason not to use their experience.
There is pink, of course, but that’s mostly for little girls. Products aimed at adult women are often in more-muted, darker colors like burgandy, maroon, and various shades of purple, as well as lighter shades of green and blue. Naturally, there is a danger, particularly if this sort of design is actually done by men who “don’t get out much”, instead of _by_ women, of going overboard on stereotypes. But it could be done very tastefully, if a real effort is put into it.
Another major factor is to get rid of the “cheesecake” and “hot-rod” art that makes up a lot of the artistic “wallpaper” material meant to appeal to young men. Or else balance it with the usual “ballet”, “horses”, and textile-art stuff that is targeted to young women (yes, I know that some women find these things insipid, but a lot men think the other stuff is silly, too). There should also be more of the neutral stuff like fine-arts, abstracts, and so on (I’m honestly not sure what Ubuntu ships with in terms of desktop backgrounds — I know there’s some basic themes that come with KDE, but it’s pretty generic stuff. I do know that I had an annoying time finding content to set up my daughter’s KDE theme — I wound up screen-capturing stuff from a Barbie video (she’s 6). My wife has a nice art print of a 19th-century woman writing at a desk, a screen capture of a ballet dancer from an episode of Angel, and several PR photos of David Tennant’s Dr. Who, and one each of “Great Teacher Onizuka” from the eponymous anime and “Washuu” from “Tenchi Muyou” on her various desktops. Though to be honest, having married me, she probably can’t be considered very “typical” ;-D).
It’s a shame this was probably an April Fools joke (just noticed the posting date). I stand by my comments, though. It’s not all that foolish.
@Terry: actually I posted it on April 1st for purpouse, for making it seem a joke. I wondered how many would have taken me seriously (this is also the reason the post lacks the authors of the respective quotes).
So, let me reassure you. This is not a joke. The quotations come from a mailing list thread started on March 30th by a Canonical employee.
You can find the thread here:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-art/2009-March/009577.html
Also: I made the Linux chicks confused
Hi Stefano,
I think you have missed the point I was trying to make so I will try to be more direct.
Ubuntu is a product that was made by (mostly) men. Painting it pink will not make Ubuntu any more or less appealing to women than it is already. To believe that women can be fooled by pretty colors is to treat women like children.
If you want Ubuntu to be equally appealing to men and women, you must have a development team that is equally male and female. Specifically, the only way is to get women involved in designing and building Ubuntu, especially during the decision-making process. This will result in many small changes, things that are not obvious to us men, that will make each new version of Ubuntu slightly more appealing to women (without wrecking it’s appeal to men).
There is no shortcut to this process. It is a gradual thing that comes from working together and continually improving your product and the methods by which your product is made and continuously improving working relationships between men and women.
@Hunter: I should apologize. I didn’t answer to your point because I fully agree. I just replied to things i wanted to elaborate, instead. My fault.
I agree especially with:
To believe that women can be fooled by pretty colors is to treat women like children.
Well, I don’t think they want to threat women as children, my post can be misleading. I encourage you to read the original mailing-list thread ( i posted the url in my last comment ).
What I really think is that there is not much to do for women. Not with themes, at least.
My guess is that women won’t care or even notice a feminine(?) gtk theme. A simple wallpaper would be much more noticeable than a whole new gtk theme. I also think that it’s very unlikely that girls will get an icon theme just for them.
I would have very much like it if it was real! Still hoping though…
A female theme is needed, as is needed a children’s theme. There are some themes all around that could be considered as for children, but nothing dedicated to women. I believe to the idea of 5 (easily selected) default Lucid Lynx themes, one dark, one bright, one apple like, one female oriented and children oriented.