Hello Alan,
Thanx for answering. Until now, I didn't get much feedbacks about my work.
Tango has eyecandy but the really important thing is the underlying icon specification. I really hope that work could happen at the same time as any switch to another icon set, we've had one switch already.
Now to the icons themselves. Consistency is good but you have made the retangle, star, and circle, all the same colour. I understand some people prefer all their icons to be almost monochrome (see the lastest version of Krita Paint in KOffice) but this was an intentional difference in Inkscape which Sodipodi didn't have and as far as I know there is nothing in Tango which should prevent you from having this differentiation.
My main concern with the actual icons set is the amount of details. I think that the current icons want to say to much about what they are and what they do. For me, it's the same problem with the colors of the primitives shapes. Those icons are more about shape, not colors. Colors for primitive shapes icons are not helping to understand what they are about: to create primitves shapes.
Usually, a professionnal image processing program (like photoshop or illustrator) use only grey icons to help to focus on the work (and to prevent colors interactions between images and icons). It would be a nice thing to have an "all grey switch" (desaturate the icons) has a preference option to the one how want to have the "professional attitude" ;)
The Tango project use white color for all the primitives shapes: http://tango.freedesktop.org/ArtLibreSet I like best a grey/blue color... White is to much about iPod right now :)
To avoid to much icon style switch, I will double check the Tango's guidelines! promise!
Only the most frequently used items should need toolbar icons, I wonder if both import/export bitmap are really all that frequent. More to the point if a user feels the need to hit those buttons over and over there has to be a better overall process for batch exporting bitmaps but I'm repeating myself on this topic. I can sort of understand the document properties (metadata) having toolbar icon but if the preferences need to be changed so often as to require a toolbar icon then the preferences are badly broken ("snap to grid" probably and a few others probably need to be moved back into the menus, was a nice idea but it didn't really work. Using the menu structure from Adobe/Macromedia might serve as a useful baseline if anyone is interested in trying to figure it out.)
I have the same opinon! Libegg could be THE solution. Customisable toolbars... The dream :) Should be in Inkscape 0.46: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap
Another issue with the logic of the icon metaphors - again not your fault
- is that font family is represented with a big T and the text tool is
represented with a big A. An icon or graphic to show _text_ kinda sucks in principle but it practice is it sometimes unavoidable. Using the letter T for text makes sense in English but not necessarily other languages, which is why the letter A is used instead. In rare cases applications implement a whole load of infrastructure to allow internationalisable icons for things like (B)old, (I)talic, (U)nderline. Abiword is one such application that has or at least had this infrastructure but once Abiword switched to the Gnome 2 icons it just used the letter A.
I don't really know what to do with the T icon... An blod italic A? Anyway, I think it should be entierly removed (the icon and the windows options too)! Almost all the text style options are in the Text Tool options toolbar now (except the "Line spacing")
To answer another question (and if I recall correctly) the 24x24 icon size is a Tango thing, to try and bring Gnome closer in line with other platforms and avoid squishing and rescaling effects.
I have made a bug submit about this one. 22x22 is the new default size for small icons (also used in KDE): http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines