Honestly the second screenshot with Sticky Notes is definitely ugly, but that one? It looks fine for me. The left margin is where the text is, and on the right there is an illustration which has (almost) uniform padding on the right and on the bottom, which leaves enough room for the popup not to feel cluttered. You could maybe add a little more margin to the left of the text, but it really isn't that visible to me. I would rather complain about the settings icon which feels bigger than the close button, if anything.
> The left margin is where the text is, and on the right there is an illustration which has (almost) uniform padding on the right and on the bottom, which leaves enough room for the popup not to feel cluttered. You could maybe add a little more margin to the left of the text, but it really isn't that visible to me.
Well, it is visible, and the professional solution for this would be to have icon design guidelines and enforce them, such that the actual visible/non-transparent icon contents are always in the same "box", and then include the padding in the icon itself in the calculation for element spacing. The fact that one component is text and the another one is an icon is not a valid excuse, these things can be planned in advance, especially for a desktop environment that has been around for close to 29 years now.
Oh, and now that I've looked the image more, even more alignment/padding issues:
- the main text isn't vertically aligned in the (I assume) fixed size vertical window
- similar story for the KDE icon and the KDED text in the titlebar
- the settings icon is bigger/the "content box" of the icon is bigger than that of the windows close (x) icon, such as that the visible contents are not padded the same amount, vertically
As I said, I guess the solution at this point is to not care and just accept that KDE is KDE, that weird but kind uncle at every family Christmas party.
