Ok this is a tricky one!

It's not set in stone and it's based on that the very active Krita community likes what ever is done! So there might be a lot of back and forth in this issue.

Krita needs new tools-icons. They recently changed layer icons to these


And the same design specs have to apply for the tool icons... essentially dark icons with a halo effect to make them visible on all backgrounds but not overdo the halo effect.

The shapes of the tools icons or what symbol is used to represent each tool can of course vary and I personally suggest something chubbier (rounder and less detailed, more symbolic than imagery) to go with the next version of Plasma's iconwork.

Here are all the current icons in the toolbox


As you can see there is (left-to-right, top-to-bottom):
Arrow, Text, Paintbrush, Straight Line, Square, Circle, Polygonal Shape, Polygonal Line, Path, Freehand Path, Dynamic Brush, Multibrush, Crop, Move, Transform, Measure distance, Paint Bucket/Fill, Eye Dropper/color picker, Gradient, Ruler, Perspective Grid, Edit Grid, Box Select, Circle Select, Brush Select (you paint what you want selected), Polygonal Area Select, OUtline Select, Select Continuous Area, Color Select, Path select.

So what do you guys and girls think? Any sketches/ideas?

Are general design guidelines for the new iconset out yet? It's important for Krita to not diverge from the general style of Oxygen's successor, because if the same functions are present in other KDE applications as well, they should not have different icons.

Ah yes - like I mentioned on the G+ post - the issue right now is that Krita uses more or less unique icons and as the work on the Next icon theme is underway that means that it wont roll out for a while yet.
This in turn means that the Krita icons can either be tweaked to better fit the Next icons - or by sticking to a monochromatic color ideal with rounded symbolic shapes - even be a part of a larger unified set. Which would benefit the whole of KDE, Plasma included.

There are some rules of thumb being used in the current work - but it is also resting more or less in the hands of the two icon designers in the VDG, Acidrum and Fabian.

I think that this is one of those cases where we can safely say: "Go for it!" and see what comes out. It's a perfect testing area because of it's unusual and complex icons and even though the work may not be implemented into Krita (because it is of course up to the Krita community) it can also be a good example for designers to strut their stuff a tad.

Everyone wins!

Wouldn't it be better to make two sets one for dark color scheme an one for light.
(the same set in negative)
They would look pretty good on a dark theme(could be made a little darker for better contrast) - the default krita look.
One general set is a bad idea imho...
//edit
I always liked the krita toolbox icons simple and recognizable, maybe they could use a small facelift(removing gradients adding the glow/shadow)

Erax:
Ah good point to take up! The reason why I did only ONE set (I did the layer ones) was because it wasn't possible according to the devs (or that it was too tricky at the time meaning they would rather have one set). So it's dark with a white halo for now.

But if you have any ideas how to marry the two looks nothing says that it doesn't have to be the other way around, mind!

My idea regarding this would be take icons to the next level: Not having static color choices, but dynamic ones, like in Plasma 2.
As many applications do not support that the way Plasma 2 is handling it, my idea would be, to recolor the icon set, when choosing the color scheme of the application.
So the idea would be: You choose your color scheme in system settings. When hitting apply, a recolor process is triggered, that recolors the icon colors of monochrome icons following the text color, or a user defined one.

See here for details: viewtopic.php?f=285&t=119754

So basically monochrome icons would follow the text color.
This should not be too hard to implement, but the question is, how fast it would be. But for svg icons this should take way less than 1 second, so it could be triggered if special applications like Krita start up, that have their own color scheme.

What do you think? Is my idea clear?

Jens: Could you ask Nuno what he thinks?

@Colomar: Krita has unique icons because artists want icons that are not distracting from the main image, so the icon are different from the Oxygen style e.g. no color. Beside that they also have to work with dark themes.

@jensreuterberg: Two icon sets are possible, I think. It would require that the application figures out if the current theme is dark or bright. Could be problematic for not clearly defined themes, but I think most themes are either dark or bright.

@kdeuserk: Many of the icons are quite complex with gradients and multiple shades of some color. Krita also has about 50 icons visible, so generating that many icons takes some time. Beside that I guess it could break the KDE icon cache.

@slangkamp Really? I was absolutely certain that last go around Boud mentioned it would be better/only possible with one?

Might be that I'm not seeing the problem that Boud sees, but at least for a technical point it's possible to change the icons. What was the reason there?

This was way back while fixing the layer icons so tbh I don't remember - I remember it being something that was suggested we didn't do (because I initially wanted two icon sets) but that's about it.

Well, ive been working on a new icon set for the program, because to be honest, the tool icons are kind of misleading in my opinion, so heres my progress so far
and yes i do prefer simple monochrome icons because i think they look more professional and less distracting to the eye of the artist




Im using the default light krita theme and the dark as base for this, and as you can see i replaced some icons for example the text tool with something more simple and logical like a K because of Krita and KDE

Also in the light theme the icons are like kind of engraved on the Ui and Extruded out on the dark

I know some of the are still missing and some of them are like not polished yet so any feedback would be welcome please

Ohh and here's an example on a tweaked image using them on the dark theme ( plz ignore the guy )
http://s17.postimg.org/i99ojiddp/image3004.png

Monochrome is good -- in fact, excellent. I like the clean look, but I wonder how clear the icons are at 16x16.

As for the K for text -- it's a fun idea, but i expect uses to complain that they cannot find the Text tool anymore because they will look for T.

Wow, that looks so nice. The K should be switched to a T, otherwise users could get confused.

Hey thanks for the feed back

Actually i didn't thought about the Text tool at first but now that you mention it youre right , its gonna cause confusion, so i will change it

is 16x16 the default size of every icon on the tool box ? any ways im gonna do a test and post it so you can see how they look

Awesome work Legna!

I especially love the Brush and Line-brush icons, brilliant idea!