If you thought we’d dropped off the face of the planet, you probably missed it: we have moved away from Medium and started publishing on our faster, open source, and privacy-respecting blog at blog.elementary.io. We’ve kept this blog post unlisted here on Medium for posterity, but all recent and future posts as of November, 2019 are exclusively hosted there.

While we’re scrambling to put the finishing touches on the impending Juno Public Beta, for this month’s progress post I’d like to talk a bit about some of the look and feel changes you can expect in elementary OS 5.

Expanded & Refined Color Palette

One of the largest foundational changes we made this cycle was to dial in our official color palette and expand it to include 5 shades per color.

This new expanded palette means greater consistently between our iconography and our stylesheet and gives our third-party app developer community a much better framework for making their apps feel native to elementary OS.

As of Juno, the elementary palette will be pre-installed by default as a .gpl file and ready to use in Inkscape and GIMP. We’re also adding color variables to our stylesheet so that you can use constants like @LIME_500 or @GRAPE_700 in your app’s custom styling.

Icon Changes

There has been an incredible amount of work done on icons this cycle. So far we’ve already changed over 850 icon files. This includes redesigns, new icons, updating icons to take advantage of the new palette and hinting icons to more sizes.

The new palette really shines in green icons like the epub file icon

File type icons have especially seen some big changes recently. You can see that we’ve gone from a variety of styles with inconsistent colors to a more unified look with symbols that scale better to small sizes.

New development-related file type icons

We’ve also introduced some new, development-related file type icons for things like translation files and programming languages.

Many icons are now fully-hinted in 6 sizes

There’s been a lot of work on increasing the consistency between icons at their various sizes and many icons are now fully-hinted in 6 sizes.

Updating all of these icons and filling in the gaps has been a huge effort and I’d like to give special thanks to Micah Ilbery, Sam Hewitt, Simon Steinbeiß, and many others for all of their hard work.

You can see the full diff of icon changes here on GitHub.

Stylesheet Changes

This cycle we made the massive leap from Gtk+ 3.18 to Gtk+ 3.22. For those not aware, this entailed what was nearly a full rewrite of the stylesheet. So a lot of work this cycle has gone into making sure that things look at least as good as they did in the previous release. However, we have taken time to put in a number of improvements.

One thing many users were asking us for was higher contrast. We’ve heard your feedback and you’ll see darker text and icons as well as more subtle gradients throughout the UI in the new version of elementary OS.