Hello,

first of all as this is my first post in the VDG forums, let me say a huuuuuge THANK YOU for your work, ranging from mockups over new styles to icons. Thank you, seriously, you brought a whole new era.

Now this is a bit hard but quite some people are voicing their feedback on the reworked systray icons after Plasma 5.0 (the latest ones), so I decided to channel it here. The feedback is unfortunately mostly negative towards these new icons and some people are asking for the Plasma 5.0 ones (those round ones). Personally I agree with them, but I'm unsure why exactly that is. Maybe it has to do with those 1px lines those new icons are composed of. The previous ones were more "blurry" on the edges and it imho better blended to the panel.

Also I feel they lost some sort of consistency - the 5.0 icons were all mostly based on a circle, creating quite a consistent look, this is now also gone.

That sums up my personal feelings.

As numerous people in #plasma would be very happy if those old icons would return (me included), I just felt some feedback should be given

Cheers

can you post a screen shot please

Absolutely, here it is:

When I saw the new icons the first time I strongly disliked them and missed the old ones, but now I really like them.

Me to. Why sould there be a blurry effect. at the breeze icons you also haven't a blur effect.

And that's all fine, no design fits everyone This is just what I gathered in #plasma...

Also they appear more blurry in the screenshot because I reverted to some older revision of plasma-framework and it used to just apply css to the svgs to give them inverted colors and they used to be that blurry with breeze-dark. They are not so much with normal breeze.

mck182, first off thanks for taking the time to post your concerns. Seriously. We cannot improve without sharing our thoughts. So don't ever hesitate about sharing feedback.

About the new plasma theme icons. They were updated to match the style of the main Breeze icon theme in order to ensure consistent iconography thought the entire workspace and applications. The icons in 5.0 while quite good on their own, were completely different in style (and in some cases metaphors) than the main Breeze icon theme.

Now that doesn't mean that adjustments can't be made to improve the Plasma theme icons even while maintaining the style of the main Breeze icon theme. Small tweaks can be made if it doesn't completely contradict the corresponding icon in the main icon theme. If larger changes are needed then the both the icon in the main theme and the plasma theme will be changed. In any event the full intent is to treat iconography throughout the entire workspace as one, regardless of the underlying technical implementation.

Hope that makes sense.

Now let's see what specific areas of concern we might be able address and what suggestions our main icon designer, Uri, or the VDG community might have to address them.

I fully agree with alake that the icon set in on one place so that uri or any other icon developer can make the iconography of the full desktop (KDE).

They were updated to match the style of the main Breeze icon theme in order to ensure consistent iconography thought the entire workspace and applications.

That's imo quite a nice effort!

So a little more concrete feedback on the new icons:

* the network icon metaphor is not really clear (often it's seen as "resistor")
* network and usb icons each point to different way, everything else is straight
* each icon seems a different size (where previously it was all sorta a cirlce, so it felt more "same size"), to me anyway

Interesting fact about the klipper icon - it went through all three cut-copy-paste icons - it used to be scissors (cut icon), then it was two papers (copy icon) and now it's a clipboard (paste icon)

Anyways, as it's clear the old icons won't ever come back, would it be ok if I would just dig them out and distribute in a package (nothing official, just a random 3rd party package)?

alake wrote:Now let's see what specific areas of concern we might be able address and what suggestions our main icon designer, Uri, or the VDG community might have to address them.

Okay my guess: While the metaphors are better in the new icon set imho (e.g. the usb), some new icons are asymmetric which creates a little bit of a dis-balanced look. The clipboard icon simply stands out (imho) from the rest of the icons, maybe because it is so thin, so the stroke width among the different icons of the new set is not as consistent as before.

Another thing I noticed: The height of the new icons is higher, so the take more vertical space, but the blue selection bar on the top has not been adjusted, so the blue selection bar overlaps with the icons which creates an unpolished look and feel, this should be corrected before the release. I'll post a screenshot when I am on a plasma 5.1 setup again.

I like the new ones much better.

To me, technically, they are better executed than the old ones.

there are a couple of issues that may be present tough.
The usual old issue of apparent size and apparent alignment.
for instance klipper icons looks much bigger than others, like the network or devicenotifier.

another thing, is to pay attention to metaphors, changing an icon to a new metaphor is something that should be quite a big deal, because may decrease usability for a while, especially now that icons are monochrome, is something that in general breeze icons should pay more attention to.

Note: I have a personal desire to get rid of the old icon metaphors which reference objects not actually related to computing or objects which are no longer in use (floppy disk save, scissor cut, clipboard paste, etc.). My perception is necessarily coloured by this wish.

1.
I really thought the former icon for Klipper was much nicer, as it didn't "have" to represent two sheets of paper, but merely two instances of the same object. It was a generic copy-ideogram, and represented Klipper, where one can find all the stuff that's previously been copied.

2.
The new USB icon looks like my Logitech Unifier dongle, and at initially seeing it, I would expect to find settings for my wireless keyboard and mouse under this icon.

3.
The network icon is a resistor. Or if not, I really can't tell what it's supposed to represent. The first icon association I get from it is that it's one of the Link icons from a new icon set Björn is user testing... I'd really like the former icon for network, or a redone version of the new one.

veqz wrote:Note: I have a personal desire to get rid of the old icon metaphors which reference objects not actually related to computing or objects which are no longer in use (floppy disk save, scissor cut, clipboard paste, etc.). My perception is necessarily coloured by this wish.

That's actually the very thing that i'm not really fine with, seems to ignore completely how psychologically iconography works, pretty much since cave-painting days, so something slightly more ingrained in human nature rather than the relatively new concept of "computer icons".

The one and only goal of any graphical representation of anything, being an object or an action, is to convey the meaning of what you want to represent, and that just like text, is something that to work has to be ingrained in the pattern recognition of the brain. When an icon has been in a way forever, the brain recognizes the meaning of the symbol in the context of the UI way faster than it can actually decode what real object is, therefore what that object means in this context, it's just an ideogram based language, not unlike Chinese.

I was discussing with Björn about this at Akademy, and one of the things that came up is that for instance everybody that complains that the save icon is a floppy, recognize that it means save without problems. the (still few) that have no idea what a floppy is, recognize that it means save without any problems, almost better than who knows what a floppy is, while if you ask to anybody what the current breeze icon represent without context, "download" will be a popular choice.

While paradoxically, icons that are known since years to not work that well, namely copy and paste nobody seems to want to change them. (didn't knew that, but between the popular icons those two apparently have the worst recognizability ratio of all)

It is hard to argue against the functionality of certain icons, so ideally I would like the replacement icons to be as recognizable as the old ones - and to keep the old ones until the new ones are as good. I just wanted to fly my colours right away, so everybody knows from where I'm arguing.

Still, copy and paste icons are both somewhat inadequate? Then we could theoretically go back to the copy-icon for Klipper?

And my arguments against the two other icons still stand.