Keeping the philosophy of doing the democratic thing, I thought about opening a thread about the icon job for Plasma NEXT, so all the people involved in doing icons (including me) can share and discuss the work progress.

For the time being, maybe some of you saw what Jens uploaded on the "Plasma NEXT mockups and sketches" (if don't, you can see it here). Taken that as a start point I thought they were a little too much "squared" yet, so I changed the radius on corners. Here's what I have at this right moment (complete icons, can't show icons in progress ):

(Thanks for the tip, Alake!)

Any comments, suggestions, insults, questions, whatever is welcome. Also, Fabian, Nuno and Uri are encouraged to be involved here and share their work.

Best regards from the Republic of Bananas!

acidrums,

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Good luck! Super excited about your iconwork!

Awesome work!
(I am honest to goodness doing this right now

I've just made a Git repo to work with Uri (and if case you want to check current status/play with them/whatever):

git clone git://gitorious.org/kde-plasma-next-ico ... -icons.git

I want to share a reference book for my work, that happen to be updated yesterday to its third version: The Pixel Perfect Precision handbook. It's a very nice stuff for us digital designers, that teach to look at the fine details and become better with our skills. Not only for icon people, everyone here would want to take a look at it.

Enjoy and happy designing!

In our german *buntu forum a few users gave me feedback for the icons, there are 2 critiques i need to agree.
one is that with the unified form, its hard to tell what application we have here. i have this problem right now with amarok and chromium browser in oxygen, both are with round, blue icons. and sometimes i just start the wrong application. if we do the same for everything - apps, directories, mime-types it will be much harder. and because blue is our main color again, it will be the same situations.

the secound one is that "it looks like faenza, why you dont use it instead of recreate faenza?" http://tiheum.deviantart.com/art/Faenza-Icons-173323228

++thanks for this nice handbook

Well I can actually answer that criticism.

The reason why we do square or shaped icons is because they are easier to align. The issue with other icons are that alignment is trickier as the weight shift depending on the shape. That it would be trickier to find which is which ... that's a big issue and currently the jury is out. The HIG guys looked around for any research on it and couldn't find one. Some say they thing it is, others dont.

As for "Its Faenza" - well I'd say its more Betelguese, more Compass, more like like Nitrux, more like etc etc etc we will never get away from it as everyone will see that it's squared and equate it with "the last square icon theme I used and remember". This was kinda expected. To say its "recreating Faenza" is too strong a wording though and tbh its make belief and nonsense.
And also - I have yet see ANYONE give a good example of what it SHOULD be instead of what it shouldn't be. I'll give the users a week to work out a new icon theme - if they can't well. Too late, we got work to do. In this case we can't run scared wondering what "random angry person in blog" think. Lets do this and if they create an alternative - awesome (I kinda think that every single one who complain now aren't doing an icon theme or even care about alternatives tbh)

I remember talking with a friend of mine about this, she makes icons for games from time to time - the issue is that no matter what you do everyone will always say two things:
1) They look exactly like X.
2) I can't see them.

1) is because all work is derivative - its inescapable and humans tend to recognize things based on the things they resemble so they will always claim things something looks like something else. On the other hand would you have done something completely different (which at this point is tricky as circles, non-shaped and hexagons are out) people would dislike that too.
2) Because we use icons to define different things for us, they are symbols we use daily. When the symbols change from the exact same symbols we are used to we can't recognize them and have to think a second longer. That doesn't mean you can replace a symbol with everything but all it is is just a generally agreed upon idea of a sign.

So this is one of those - if we did nothing, they would hate us. If we did something, they would hate us.

And we slammed into a brick wall today:

Square icons will probably be a no go.

The reason for which is that a lot of applications from proprietary software will simply not blend well as we can't edit their icons in any significant way if we want to keep the icon theme as the standard one (which is the idea) - so since they wont work the point of a square icon set falls through. Sadly - after much a do it became appearent that no matter how much this is one of those things we can't argue our way out of.
The reason why we can't redo some important icons is that the companies who have trademarked their icons will be forced due to trademark law to defend their visual property and branding and simply sue us. The issue would not have cropped up had we been a smaller group doing some small icon theme - but this is the official gebit and that's what trademark law looks like (remember Debian and Iceweasle)

There was also the issue that Plasma will be used also in a professional setting and worries where raised that our icons where not "adult" enough. So they need to look at that.

This means two things.
1) We have to ask Acid and Uri to rethink and start over redoing all the work they've done so far.
2) Everyone who aren't tied up directly in other work - report for duty with Acid and Uri. If you can handle Inkscape - that's where you're going.

Reworking an icon set from scratch is a lot of work, ridiculous amounts of work and doing a "non-shaped" icon theme means twice as much. That means that we all have to pitch in.

This failure lands of course on my shoulders as I should have foreseen it, and been able to deal with it. But it is the axe - and we have wield it.

> And also - I have yet see ANYONE give a good example of what it SHOULD be
> instead of what it shouldn't be. I'll give the users a week to work out a new icon
> theme - if they can't well. Too late, we got work to do. In this case we can't run
> scared

This is really hard to do. Every icon theme looks gorgeous in its promo material - until you start using it.

> Square icons will probably be a no go.

I didn't expect this, to be honest. Maybe we should start by opening the oxygen icons folder (move them all in a single folder (just a single size, for example 48x48), to show them in a nice list and grid), see which ones of those look misaligned and mark them. This way we might figure out some commonalities of the problematic icons.

That way we could have guidelines to avoid the problem.

Something like this:
Do:
mkdir /tmp/oxyicons
cd /tmp/oxyicons
cp /where/the/oxygen/icons/are/48x48/**/*.png
gwenview /tmp/oxyicons



Mark the misaligned icons, and delete them. (the above selection is quite obvious - those icons are presenting different alignments )

Afterwards do
cd /tmp/oxyicons
ls -1 > my-choices.txt

--

One thing I wanted to mention before I read the news is that for large icons, it is quite dangerous to use the pixel-line contrast effect (as used above) - it will be necessary to actually do a different icon for every size we want to support.

The usual approach is to create one icon that can handle larger sizes 32x32 and bigger (maybe even 24), and specialize the smaller sizes.

Ivan what ever we do - we need to back Acid and Uri to the hilt now and make certain that any suggestion is based on the firm knowledge that their time isn't only as valuable as everyones but that they have just been given a major set-back AND less time to do the work in.

I'm trying to scrounge up people who can handle Inkscape and follow instructions outside of the VDG so both of them can head up a team for this situation until they feel they are on the right track. It's also an issue of getting your ideas suddenly dumped which is a horrible situation to be in, not only due to the work being done so far - but because of the sensation to the designer.

I'm gonna try to look into how to "flattenize" the Oxygen icons to see if we can easily make the theme more "blendable" with whatever Acid and Uri think up - so that they don't have to worry about the transition period at least.

(Tbh I haven't slept properly all night thinking about this... :/ )

> issue of getting your ideas suddenly dumped which is a horrible situation
> to be in, not only due to the work being done so far - but because of the

I know the feeling... Shame, the folder icons are really nice (and me saying something good about square icons say a lot).

Would it be possible to keep some of the icons square, for example the mimetype/places/devices icons?

Just for some clarity going forward, wouldn't it be fair if we considered only application icons to be off-limits for significant alteration by KDE artwork decisions (like squariness, etc.)?

Application icons are really where the trademark concerns are anyway. That would leave all the other system icons (folders, places, devices, mimetypes, etc.) fully under control of the artwork decisions made by the KDE community - as it should be. From a visual design standpoint I think that would work quite well as you get all the benefits of a consistent design language for system icons while preserving the uniqueness, both visually and legally, of application icons. If this approach is agreeable, it might be worth clarifying with other parts of the community so we can separate genuine trademark concerns from other potential concerns about the artwork.

If I'm being honest, the only concern of substance about the square icons fall into the trademark concern bucket. If we agree that app icons are off limits for squariness anyway, the only issues that remain arise out of the normal design-feedback cycle (polish, professionalism, etc.). Those are things we can certainly address while preserving much of the excellent work Acid and Uri have done so far. (I challenge someone to say square icons can't be polished or professional).

Well I asked Uri and Acid to talk it through with Nuno until this saturday so hopefully by then they will have some good idea for how to move forward. Personally I gotta say that as long as they are all happy the three of them - nothing can be wrong.

If the mimetypes, places, devices etc stay square I am all thumbs going upwards, if not and they have found another way I am pretty certain that between the three of them the sollution will probably be pretty brilliant

I didn't have time to do anything until today (now), I however have a question, what icons (as in which category: actions, apps, places, etc.) are we doing?. Because I see this: viewtopic.php?f=285&t=120026 - which for the looks of it aims to provide the monochrome icons to be used in the toolbars or that's what I get out of it and those would be the ones in the /actions folder.