On 2009-January-27 , at 06:26 , bulia byak wrote:
With this comparison, I cannot help noticing that it is definitely the Tango icons that look more childish, naive, clumsy - not our current set.
Both look childish. That's because of the colors. Now both look like a plastic children toy :)
But the old set copes much better with color thanks to its strong, graphic black outline. It's the outline that holds them together graphically, color is just a decoration. With the anemic outline-less Tango ones, color indeed mostly fails. There's nothing to hang that color on, basically :)
The design principle of Tango, as far as I can tell, is to use a different value of the same hue for the stroke. You can see in the Tango color swatches[1] that there are three swatches for each color/ hue. You are supposed to use the central one for the main color and surround it with two strokes of the lighter then darker versions (so that the icon works well on light or dark backgrounds). This, to me, gives their distinctive look to the Tango icons. In some cases, I find that it works well in holding the central color and giving the icon some consistency (see the blue rectangle for example). I agree that the outline could be made a bit darker in some other icons and this is within the Tango guidelines: "The common practice when drawing icons is to use the palette as a base, applying it on large areas. Shading with gradients, creating highlight and shadows by changing value, and minor changes of saturation are also allowed and endorsed. Colors do not have to come exclusively from this set, as additional colors may be used. Starting from the base color and changing value, saturation or even hue slightly gives more consistant results than starting from arbitrary colors."
I would suggest lowering the value for the dark outline of the following icons: zoom 3d box star flow fill (the bucket in particular) connector pipette (the glass part in particular) This would probably make them more coherent with the current theme.
[1] http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines#Color_Palette and included as a swatches palette with Inkscape
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/