Unified default user avatars
Despite this initiative the default user avatar images are still not in great shape across GNOME.
Use cases in core:
- GNOME Shell
- Initial Setup
- Settings
- Contacts
Use cases in non-core:
- Fractal
- Geary
- Calls
- Chatty
Not yet, but soon:
- Phosh (phone shell)
We currently have a number of implementations in different places, all of them slightly different and most of them don't look great. In particular, the issues I see include:
- Letters are too large, which can look awkward when there are two letters
- The
normal
font weight doesn't look great for this - In many cases the text is white and the background colors very saturated, which feels a bit stark for a placeholder
- Some colors are not great (e.g. yellow with white text)
- The flat background colors look kind of plain and boring at larger sizes (e.g. on the new lock screen)
- Depending on the letters, they can look off-center vertically
Some potential fixes for making the avatars look nicer:
- Significantly smaller letters
- New, unified color palette based on (but not exactly the same as) the GNOME icon palette, optimized for this use case
- Light vertical gradients instead of flat colors as the background
- Using a modified (lighter, slight hue shift) version of the background color as the text color instead of plain white (Fractal does this)
- Using the
bold
orultra-bold
font weight - Always center the letters vertically instead of having a fixed baseline
We should also find a way to unify the implementation of these avatars, so we can reduce duplicated effort and make it easier to update them across everything. This could take the form of a shared library/system API, or a library every app would bundle. Seeing as this is a common widget also needed by third party apps, it might be worth putting it into the new HIG library for GTK4 (and/or libhandy for GTK3).