andreas_k wrote:

The lack of contrast between the background and the symbol itself is my main concern, it would be nice if this change was implemented.

was done yesterday (https://github.com/NitruxSA/plasma-next-icons/pull/125)

we also look that this change will get into Plasma 5.3.

Thanks for the feedback. Hope you like the result.

It looks good.
It would be nice too if the colors can be desaturated, as luebking suggested, so the symbol will be more balanced with the colors as a more strong hint for the similarity principle of Gestalt (to improve the sensation of group between them more easily at first glance).

I only came to this thread now and mostly skimmed through.

I understood that the image mimetypes have different background colors
in order to quickly distinguish between the various sub-types. I do have to
agree with Thomas Luebking and I kinda personally find this a bit confusing
too.

So I thought - why not keep all the image mimetypes same color and simply
add a subtle actual type to the icon itself? Kinda like what darktable does,
see https://lukisantulisan.files.wordpress. ... ktable.png for
a screenshot. Look at the top-left corners of the image previews. Something
similar could be placed at, say, bottom-left/right corner of the mimetype
icons while all main types (images, video etc) could retain the same color?

If you need to know the type, it's there, you can look for it, if you don't care,
it's very subtle and you can very easily overlook it. Looks like everybody would
win?

I dunno if this was already considered or not, I don't really follow the icon
development, so please pardon my ignorance on this topic.

After some months of use, i can say that the situation was improved a little bit with the changes made on april, but i'm afraid that is not enough to solve it completely.
I still think that the best solution (in terms of effort) would be the one suggested by Thomas Luebking in this post: viewtopic.php?f=285&t=124786&start=15#p332754

I like the idea of Martin, but if i understood it well, it seems to be somewhat incompatible with the actual 'implementation' of the icons and also this solution does not please Uri. See viewtopic.php?f=285&t=124786#p331382.

If this issue breaks your workflow i suggest Evolvere Blue Folders icon theme as a workaround. The integration with Breeze style is good enough.
Of course, the best solution will be to made the changes propossed by Thomas.

Cheers.

EDIT: typos

Hi,

freeze was yesterday so we have enough time to improve the mime-type icons but

1. use the latest breeze icon set (https://github.com/NitruxSA/plasma-next-icons), because the contrast was increased and 32px icons were supported too
2. mockups what could be improve the mimetypes

thanks
andreas

I have done a quick mockup, but keep in mind that my art skills (color harmony and those things) are somewhat limited. Also, I did not take into account some accessibility aspects of the color theme, such as use colors that works with color blind people.
These are quick and dirty mockups to show two approaches:

1. Using the same background color per group and different colors per types (suggested by luebking):


2. Using different colors per group, and same colors per type (current implementation but with extreme contrast):


In my opinion, 1 solves the issue completely.
I think that 2 can be improved increasing the thickness of the icon contained on the sheet, so the foreground color becomes more prominent (image, text, ...) and the desaturated background color can be interpreted as a hint of the file type (png, jpg, ...) more easily.

Cheers.

Edit: Add extreme constrast test.

I'm not sure I like the color choices. Also, green + red is a big no-no. Think of the colorblind people
Wouldn't just decreasing the vibrance of the filetype sheets solve the issue?

Soukyuu wrote:I'm not sure I like the color choices. Also, green + red is a big no-no. Think of the colorblind people

Yeah, as i already say in my previous post, this is just a quick and dirty mockup. I made it not taking into account usability issues and other artistic aspects (as color armony).

Soukyuu wrote:Wouldn't just decreasing the vibrance of the filetype sheets solve the issue?

I'm afraid that decreasing the vibrance of the sheet is not enough to solve it.

The main point that i'm trying to expose through this mockups is the use a primary color and a secondary color to differentiate between file groups and file types. The primary color is the predominant color and is always used to differentiate between groups of files (image files, compressed files, text files, ...). The secondary color is a hint (so, it must be used in a more subtle way that the primary color) that allows the user to differentiate between filetypes inside a group.

In my last post I showed two approaches to achieve this:

1. The first one uses the primary color in the sheet color. The color of the glyph inside the sheet is the secondary color.
2. The second one uses the primary color on the glyph color and the secundary color in the sheet color. As the sheet is more visible that the glyph to the user, the color sheet must use less vibrant colors than in the first approach. Also, the glyph needs a little more work to increase the visibility (for example, increasing the line thickness).