Tango icon theme take 3
I've taken most of the criticism to heart: A lot of icons are now more distinct - Tango uses a medium gray for many icons, but I changed it to a darker shade. This may hurt people who use dark themes so I'm not really sure it's a good idea. I also changed the flip/rotate icons back to something similar to the existing ones.
Following Bulia's remarks about the tool icons, I decided to try and create my own icons instead of using the existing set from Art Libre: please tell me your opinion: are their functions clearer now?
Lastly, take a look at the show/hide icons in the layers menu.
download link: http://grosberg.michael.googlepages.com/icons.svg.zip
Michael Grosberg
P.S. happy holiday season everyone!
On Thu, 2007-12-27 at 14:19 +0000, Michael Grosberg wrote:
download link: http://grosberg.michael.googlepages.com/icons.svg.zip
I think the magnifying glass icons lack contrast, making their distinct details hard to recognise. Just squint your eyes a bit and compare old and new ...
The bottom-to-top-of-anchor alignment icon and the 3 similar ones all have the problem that it's not that clear what the anchor is (old as new). At least I manage to mix them up again and again. One would thing the single vs group thing would be hint enough, but somehow I tend to overlook it. Maybe making the anchors dark to appear heavy would help? Perhaps combined with blue for stationary and a warm colour for movement.
Thanks, better, but now the shape icons are too bright imho :) especially the circle.
Also, why do we need to have white lines with black outline in spiral and pencil, and not vice versa? This looks noisy and does not match the default style of the tools.
I also very much dislike the 3D box. Compared to our current one, it's so blantantly un-3D. The drawing tools are also rather flattish.
In general, while the tango icons now start to approach the current ones, I still don't yet see in what way they are better.
On Thu, Dec 27, 2007 at 12:58:29PM -0400, bulia byak wrote:
In general, while the tango icons now start to approach the current ones, I still don't yet see in what way they are better.
Looking at the latest icons, I also was unclear on the motivation for them. I'm used to the old set, but the new one is fresher and more colorful. However I dug a bit more into what Tango's goals are, to help understand what the benefits to them are...
One benefit is that they're designed to "fit naturally" into GNOME, KDE, Windows, and OSX stock themes without needing separate themes for each. While I personally only care about Linux, I can see the point for having things look consistent; a side benefit is that people often copy themes from one OS to another, and so the Tango icons should fit naturally with a wide range of theme options.
A second benefit is that they're organized to use the same icon for similar functionality across different applications, which may result in a cleaner workflow and better usability for Inkscape users that also use GIMP, OpenOffice, Scribus, etc. I can also see a benefit to us in that people used to Tango-ified GIMP or OpenOffice that then start up Inkscape for the first time, won't feel like the UI is alien - many icons will seem familiar, and produce familiar effects. The result will be that users can leverage what they'd learned in those other applications, and grow comfortable with Inkscape more rapidly.
A benefit that I see for us being bold about adopting Tango by default sooner rather than later, is that our icon ideas will be taken more seriously at this stage. Later on, after other applications have joined, there will already be consensus for some of the icons that need, but have better ideas for. If you look at this page, it's currently mostly empty, and I suspect our adoption of Tango may motivate decisions that take our ideas for many of these things:
http://tango.freedesktop.org/ArtLibreSet
If I remember right, we discussed Tango at the Libre Graphics Meeting a couple years ago, and felt it would be a good way to show consistency across all of the Open Source graphics applications, which could help eliminate the "piecemeal" appearance we've had to date. This could help make the Linux desktop look a lot more professional and visually appealing to new converts, which is something I'm very much in favor of.
Thanks, better, but now the shape icons are too bright imho :) especially the circle.
I kind of like them. Reminds me a bit of our original bold primary colors for rect/ellipse/star. But I agree they see a bit too bold compared with the rest of the icons.
Also, why do we need to have white lines with black outline in spiral and pencil, and not vice versa? This looks noisy and does not match the default style of the tools.
Agreed. This was also the first thing my fiance noticed when I showed her the before and afters. The double lines for these icons look weird. We also thought the calligraphy stroke should be solid; the outlined stroke doesn't match what you'd expect to get from a calligraphy pen.
I also very much dislike the 3D box. Compared to our current one, it's so blantantly un-3D. The drawing tools are also rather flattish.
Definitely agreed. However, I do like that it shows a perspective box - our original 3D box sort of looks isometric, which doesn't match to what the perspective tool does.
If the perspective box tool is going to live between the rect and ellipse tool, I would also like to see it be given a color rather than just be gray. Green would seem a logical choice for it.
Finally, I just want to say a big thank you to Michael for undertaking this work. Getting Inkscape to change icons is really tough work, but after reading up about the goals of the Tango project I think it's a very worthwhile endeavor that could bring the Open Source world a lot of benefit.
I look forward to seeing Inkscape included here: http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Showroom
Bryce
Thank you for the kind words Bryce. We now have two sets of tool icons and there are arguments in favor of using either. If consistency across application is preferred, the art libre set is still there to be used. I do think the Art Libre calligraphy icon was a wrong choice, as Gimp has a similar tool called "ink" with its own icon of an inkwell, and that should have been used for the calligraphy tool instead. As for the 3Dbox (contributed by dphase, by the way), tango guidelines call for a specific frontal perspective so this icon will blend better into the theme.
We still need to bear in mind that the theme is supposed to work on a dark background as well, and I'm afraid in wanting to make them more distinct on a light background I failed at that. I tried to create tango-compliant icons with dark strokes instead of the white line with darker stroke around it but was not happy with the result. So - if anyone can produce a nice looking set of icons using dark strokes I'd be happy to see it.
I will leave it to you developers to decide which icons to use. Any small change to icons (e.g., making the circle icon look flatter or coloring the box) can be made by Jiho or anyone else easily. By the way, is there any way of creating said oxes in any color other than blue?
Michael
On 2007-December-28 , at 09:13 , Michael Grosberg wrote:
By the way, is there any way of creating said oxes in any color other than blue?
Inkscape preferences > Tools > Rectangle Set the tool's style or set it to last used style.
BTW, I would love to see the default style use less vibrant colors and not a black stroke (either no stroke or a stroke using a darker version of the fill color). The first use of Inkscape with current colors make it look a bit childish IMHO.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
participants (5)
-
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
jiho -
Michael Grosberg -
Thorsten Wilms