a graphic design norm is, for the typographic example, how Apple Garamond is applied on Mac related stuff, or how Franklin Gothic is applied on Microsoft and Windows stuff (for ReactOS i'd bet on Vera, for historical reasons ) - the colours were about which colours are used, constrasts - how should be the composition grids and how are they applied, and so on....
i'm talking about this because i think this is important on ReactOS project (tell me your oppinion...)
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but so, telling now about GUI:
yes and no, as you can see below:nitrofurano: at least reactos should have a classic basic standard gui without skinning like xp provides it.
so the competition should have 2 parts:
a nice slightly fresh design for the classic gui (like win95 differs from xp classic view -> nice icon set, some colorchanges, some border changes and so on..) - AND - a design for the standard theme (like una is xp's standard theme).
i hope u understand what i mean
were me the one who suggested to use Everaldo icons on ReactOS, for example (and Everaldo himself loved the idea on having his icons on ReactOS distributions) - as well, having available for choose other iconpaxs got from sites like kdelook.org is not bad idea... - my first idea were using the iconpax.icl format for realtime system icon choosing...
another idea i had is you being able to use KDE and Gnome themes as easy you can with XP themes (but it can be in a more technical issue i'm not so comfortable)
otherwise - the default GUI from MacOS-X is clean and looks excellent, and there's no skin or theme over it - of course, for compatibility, maybe ReactOS GUI drawing core should follow w32 api (as well on Wine project), but i'm not against anyone should bet on a simpler and faster GUI core would be 100% compatible with w32 api - got my point about GUI?