[HIG] Iconography in Plasma Next
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Standards
Plasma (and every other graphical DE) uses icons, these icons are often found in the standard system location:
Or the following folders located in the user's home folder, these folders don't exist by default, they vary by distribution and also are hidden:
Inside the above folders the icon themes will have the following structure as described:
Usage When developing software you ought to make sure to use the icons for the proper context of the widgets that you'll be placing in the application, using icons from the wrong category in the wrong place will cause the application to completely look inconsistent and force 3rd party theme creators to use workarounds to theme applications. With the new icon theme for Plasma Next work has been made so that icons that belong to different categories have a noticeable difference between them, this way software developers can pick the correct icons for their applications and not brake the consistent look with system software. Beginning with the toolbar icons which are now monochromatic to facilitate the use and placement of elements in toolbars, it's not only recommended but enforced that icons from other categories are not to be used in this area of the application. Below we have a comparison between Kate and Muon Discover, Kate presents the proper usage of the icons in this important area of the window while Muon Discover depicts exactly what not do.  Kate and Muon Discover using the Nitrux Qt Curve theme, Muon Discover displaying the wrong usage of the toolbar icons in an application. This causes a mismatch of icons in applications that don't follow a proper usage of the iconography. Needless to say a workaround is to make the icons that don't match in a smaller size and monochromatic however this is to be avoided by using the correct icons from the proper category.  This is an unnecessary workaround. Just as above developers should only use icons located in the folder applications/ to display their software icon in menus and not icons from any other category. It's also important to note that if an icon it's not present in the default icon theme the developer can include his/her own, always following the same style to have a consistent workspace. Due to the design of Oxygen many developers choose to use icons that were otherwise not meant to be used in the way they were, Oxygen icons look very similar to each other regardless of their category and it causes issues like this:  The icon in question is edit-paste an icon from the folder actions/ being used as an application icon. This is an example of what not to do. Another case of wrong categorization occurs where icons are placed in the wrong category, that is the case of the icon repository (used in Muon Discover above) this icon is located in the folder places/ where it's mixed with icons specifically to be used as folder icons. This should also be avoided as it can confuse other developers to use the wrong icon.  Folders go with folders and with nothing else.  Like this. Naming A list of the current icons in Oxygen is:
Some of the icons are still a work in progress for the new theme however as it has been noted previously some icons are placed in the the wrong category and for this they need to be reworked and software developers will then need to change the icon that results out of place to a proper one.
Last edited by Uri_Herrera on Thu May 22, 2014 9:01 am, edited 8 times in total.
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Registered Member
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Full ack. Make this thread sticky!
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Registered Member
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Shouldn't it be possible to actually find these problems in the code? Like "If an icon from the applications folder is used in a toolbar, something is wrong"? If so, we should write an application which looks for all the problems and bug developers to fix them.
And we have to turn the things you wrote down here into an HIG and enforce it. In that case, it wouldn't actually be a guideline but really a rule. It should be allowed to just copy an icon, but never to directly use an icon from the wrong category. |
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Registered Member
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I should probably add and/or rephrase some things as I wrote it in a hurry to do the icons. I don't know if Kdevelop is what most software developers that make K software use and even if it isn't there should be like some sort of plug-in that works in Kdevelop and Qt Creator that offers the library of icons depending on the context. |
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[quote="Uri_Herrera"
I don't know if Kdevelop is what most software developers that make K software use and even if it isn't there should be like some sort of plug-in that works in Kdevelop and Qt Creator that offers the library of icons depending on the context.[/quote] I assume that with both Kdevelop and Qt Creator, we should have the vast majority of KDE devs covered. Presumably most of those who use neither of them just don't use an IDE at all, so we won't get them anyway. |
KDE Developer
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The official Freedesktop.org Icon Naming Specification can be found here.
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KDE Developer
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100% Agree on it being a HIG. Everything you said looks valid.
It should be copy and pasted into the HIG wiki rather than being here so that devs will find it. The root of the problem is that historically it has been very difficult to get new icons; whenever we do something new we need the new icons, and when Nuno is (understandably) too busy we have no choice but to pick something else and say "that works". This is the current list of new icon requests + bug reports: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_st ... _based_on= There's one from 2008. If we want devs to not abuse icons we need to be better at handling icon requests and have a faster turnaround for creating them. |
Registered Member
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The issue is that right now we're between icon's. Lets face it icon design has never been easy but right now, at this very point it's ten times as tricky because we're working on a new one.
When this is figured out to some level then we should start to get some organisation on all this.
KDE Visual Design Group - "Sexy by default - Powerful through cooperation"
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Registered Member
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A small note: According to the Freedesktop icon naming specification the directory for application icons should be called "apps" and not "applications" See table 1 in http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-n ... atest.html If I remeber correctly KDE 4.x even has the problem that it can not find some icons if they are in a folder called "applications" instead of "apps". |
Global Moderator
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Regarding a tool detecting misuse of icons, I don't think an IDE plugin is the way to go here -- it's probably hard to detect by looking at the code. I could imagine that it's relatively easy to come up with a gdb script which sets a breakpoint whenever an action is added to e.g. a toolbar and prints a warning message if its icon is not an action icon. The same could be done by adding the message to the code itself, but that requires Qt to be rebuilt with that change ... something many people probably don't exactly love to do. Of course you could put that script into an IDE plugin then but it's probably not worth the effort.
I fully agree with the topic of the thread btw -- in far too many places e.g. application icons are used for actions which can be really weird with non-default icon schemes 
I'm working on the KDevelop IDE.
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KDE Developer
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Proposing a much simpler solution (which would be a lot easier). We create an icon theme with all action icons replaced with a plain red square, all application icons with a blue square etc. We put this on kde-look as a debugging tool. |
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Global Moderator
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Registered Member
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Please have a look here: viewtopic.php?f=285&t=121622 I am working on exactly this thing right now and it's almost done 
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Registered Member
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I uploaded a first version of the debug theme to:
https://github.com/debug-icons-project There are two different themes: One includes only icons from the Freedesktop Icon Naming Specification and the other includes all icons from the latest Oxygen theme from KDE4. If you have any feedback please post it in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=285&t=121622 |
Registered Member
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Can you link to the breeze icon git repository.
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