[Meta] Evolving the GitLab Visual Personality

There have been a lot of issues and discussions about evolving the GitLab personality (#22192 (closed) ). This is a meta issue to organize our exploration and work on this effort. It is important for us to balance both the details and the big picture as we work those these ideas. To that end, below are Experiments where we can take a full page of GitLab, and really push on the design, and Basics where we can discuss the various details that make up our visual language. The two levels will inform each other, so it can be helpful to jump between. Once some ideas and directions emerge from this work, we can evaluate and start to apply it to components such as buttons and links, etc.

Experiments

Make GitLab bolder #24305

Let's try using more colors and starker contrast. We can explore adding strong shapes and lines. We can consider pushing on the typographic contrast (size, weight, etc.)

Give GitLab depth #24306

What if we split the GitLab UI into layers of information? What elements would exist on the same layer? Which elements should be 'above' others, and 'closer' to the user? What elements should be pushed back?

Extremely minimal GitLab #24307

Let's take a page of GitLab and try to simplify it and remove as much as we can, but still have the page read well and make sense. What colors would we remove? What type sizes are absolutely necessary?