A Modern Look for Granite

[danirabbit]

It's been, I think 3 years since we did our "Greenfield" stylesheet and it's starting to show its age a bit. Modern GTK is a lot more capable and with the move to including the stylesheet as part of our framework we don't have to also consider GTK3. So this is a great opportunity to rethink assumptions and chase after new design goals! This discussion post is a place to gather community feedback and find out what folks who use elementary OS want to see in terms of our design language.

What is cool, fun, and beautiful in the world of UI design going into 2026?

[danirabbit]

I really love this button interaction. They look like buttons. They react to being pressed. The little animated icon just makes it feel even more alive.

large-thumbnail20250215-3562852-ib8i2l.mp4

[teamcons]

Them providing feedback is amazing. There are UIs i absolutely hate because the buttons always look the same, no state change, no relief no nothing

on the flip side:
-where i see this, it is usually in over engineered websites where everything is a slow animation, or big heavy slow apps. As stupid as it sounds, it is vaguely distressing
-The colours and animations are cute, but over time are they distracting/annoying? Ive found often these animations to be a tad slow, and it gives a feeling of slow in return, or of UI nagging the user attention after it filled its role

[lobre]

I agree on the flip side and hope that snapiness is also a property that stays a target in elementary. I like subtle animations that guide me understand what happens, but if that becomes too much and everything moves, it becomes disraction and overall feeling of slowness instead.

[cyrneko]

if there is one piece of feedback I can leave here, it's that please keep something that isn't entirely flat, it's honestly been one of elementary's standout things for me to mention when it comes to design

where KDE, GNOME, and even XFCE on many distros often have a flat theme, elementary's stylesheet felt more calm and looked a bit nicer with subtle hints of depth

I mean, I even use it on my non-elementary system as the default GTK3/4 stylesheet, it just looks so nice

[teamcons]

Yes. This. It also gives both a personality, and of being able to click, grab, the interface.
It is so much more pleasant. Other stylesheets too often either give the feeling you tap glass, or you tap jelly beans, no inbetween.

[barunespadhy]

I agree with this, i love a skeuomorphic design. Elementary OS manages to get a very nice skeuomorphic look that's very modern too!

[zeebok]

I will try to find it but you showed a slider where the knob gets bigger when you click and drag it, and shrinks back down when you release. I think that with the accent color for the fill color would be really nice!

[danirabbit]

97f0af7516192838.mp4

[zeebok]

Yes this!

[teamcons]

Lovely

[danirabbit]

There’s some issues with contrast, but the use of colored shadows is fun (looking for example at the app icon shadow. Might be cool in dialogs?) and I particularly like the look of the category icons. That stack of screenshots also looks very swipeable and the carousel where the selected item is more elevated

[teamcons]

Overuse risks to give off a vibe of "everything neon and blurry". Like Garuda,
In small touches for attention, hey why not

[danirabbit]

I particularly like how instead of doing a smaller badged icon this design for dialogs has them side by side

[golaughlin]

I like "A" the best.

[danirabbit]

Something I prototyped a while back and have really enjoyed is this bouncy animation for menu items and image buttons etc. It just feels really satisfying to press these

fec7a7684ced28c0.mp4

[zeebok]

This is nice! I do wish the toggle itself did a very fast slide while the whole widget did the bounce

[danirabbit]

@zeebok yeah I cant remember exactly what the problem I was having with getting the switch to animate but there was some technical problem I had with it

[danirabbit]

Something already in the new WIP stylesheet is a darker dark style

Makes the current stylesheet look like a "gray" mode 😄

[RMcNeely]

Is there an intent to redo all of the colors or just make some updates to the palette?

[danirabbit]

@RMcNeely I hadn't planned to make any palette changes but this is a great time to make suggestions if you have any :)

[leoherzog]

I really like how Material Design 2 talks about use of color. Mainly that there should be a lighter, more intense shade used more sparingly in Dark Mode, vs. a more subtle, muted, and dark variant used more often in Light Themes.

https://m2.material.io/design/color/dark-theme.html

[aleconline]

finally getting on here, as per my discord message:

I think a refresh could be a great time to add MORE depth where it counts. I know a lot of people share the sentiment that Elementary is so compelling because it's one of the few operating systems that didn't switch to flat design. Depth doesn't inherently have to look dated, I've really enjoyed the look of adding subtle depth to an interface elements without looking like a full return to "dated" UI design.

I also believe a great way of modernizing eOS without dropping this identity could be through the use of delightful animations. Think buttons feeling more physical, sidebars seemingly popping out from below the current window, things glowing under the mouse (the windows vista and 7 start buttons were so fun).

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ca5b21d0-0aec-43f2-a354-453e6ef4c3ef

[aleconline]

I really enjoy the bottom screenshot where the grey space around the "SK" display at the bottom is tinted with the orange, almost as if it's glowing. I think this is a kind of similar idea to the screenshot you posted above @danirabbit

I do agree that it should be used in moderation, though. Perhaps upon mouse hover in some instances.

[barunespadhy]

This is absolutely beautiful <3

[RMcNeely]

Pulling this comment in from Discord where it received a lot of support:

Exactly. Elementary feels very comfortable right now. The corner radii are just right - not too rounded to be distracting, and I absolutely adore the button and switch design, it feels like they are meant to be pressed, and sometimes I just keep flipping them for fun, as they are super satisfying. Also, the UI actually acknowledges that contrast still exists in 2025! What a crazy idea :D

Personally I think one of the great parts of Granite is that it gives elementary a feeling of being really tactile and something that you can physically interact with.

[SubhadeepJasu]

Absolutely loving the animations. TBH I am not sure how I feel about the overall flatter look, but I believe animations like these are the way forward in making the UI more alive and tactile feeling.

[zeebok]

Is this the appropriate time and place to also consider responsive design and whatnot? Not sure if more touch/tablet/phone friendly design is still something you have on the backburner.

[danirabbit]

Another part here is the new SVG animation stuff coming in new GTK. We’ve got kind of a mix of symbolic icon styles right now. It would probably be good to try to unify a bit. I think at least moving away from solid icons to either stroke-only or dual-tone would be good.

HugeIcons is something I stumbled into recently and they have a big collection of icons in multiple styles and I really love how bubbly and friendly-looking they are https://hugeicons.com/icons

[RMcNeely]

I do love dual-tone icons 👍

[SubhadeepJasu]

Cute!

[danirabbit]

At the moment I think we have a mix of row 1, row 3 and row 5 basically.

The row 3 style works really well for icons that use accent or state colors like for example channel-secure-symbolic or starred-symbolic

It also works well when you have larger icons like these in mouse and touchpad settings:

[desiderantes]

I love the dual-tone icons! (like row 3) They look so nice and so simple while complete! full symbolic sometimes feels like a shadow of a proper object.

[barunespadhy]

I am on the same page about all the suggestions being discussed here. The animation videos posted are beautiful, and I especially liked the tactile UI concept posted by aleconline. The attention to detail is exactly what that makes this OS stand out among others. Nothing much to suggest than what's already being discussed.

[alainm23]

It’s a very interesting proposal. Another thing I’d like to see more is making the window borders a bit more rounded — macOS already does it, and so does Libadwaita. It’s not about copying, but I think it looks much better

[desiderantes]

I disagree, more roundness wastes space and does not look good, like a squircle that got inflated. It looks like it is not designed with the screens of most laptops in mind.

[TomiOhl]

The recent direction of using blur in some elements is nice - maybe it would be worth to explore more locations to include it, like even the app menu or indicator menus?