'Ello all;

We have some new Calligra icons being pushed into the icon set, and everyone involved would like some feedback for tweaks or changes;



Icons in order are Karbon, Flow, Author, Braindump, Sheets, Plan,
Plan(work), Words, Kexi, and Stage.

Just for timeline purposes, please try to get feedback in as quickly as possible; the artwork freeze is on the 6th, and I'll probably need to try to get any changes pushed a day or two ahead of that so everything syncs up in tiem to get into 5.4.

Cheers!

I feel like I'm being "that guy" now, but I think it would be strategically smart to use the same colours as Microsoft is using for its Office products, so that users (especially those coming from Windows) will have an easier time recognizing the different programs.

I.e. Words icon should have a strong blueish palette, Sheets should have much more green, Kexi more purpleish, and Stage more orange. In this example Words is white or brownish, Sheets is primarily orange, Kexi is green and Stage is blue.

Edit 1:
Note that this is also the colour set LibreOffice has chosen.

Edit 2:
Other than that, I do like them. I'm a little unsure about the general feel of the icons for Flow, Kexi and Stage. The use of shadows give then an almost-3D feel, IMO. Or not. I'm just wondering if maybe they could be a little "flatter" somehow?

Edit 3:
No wait, I have one more: I think Sheet's icon look a bit too busy. Maybe the details, especially in the spreadsheet in the lower half, could be reduced a bit?

veqz wrote:I feel like I'm being "that guy" now, but I think it would be strategically smart to use the same colours as Microsoft is using for its Office products, so that users (especially those coming from Windows) will have an easier time recognizing the different programs.

I.e. Words icon should have a strong blueish palette, Sheets should have much more green, Kexi more purpleish, and Stage more orange. In this example Words is white or brownish, Sheets is primarily orange, Kexi is green and Stage is blue.

Edit 1:
Note that this is also the colour set LibreOffice has chosen.

Edit 2:
Other than that, I do like them. I'm a little unsure about the general feel of the icons for Flow, Kexi and Stage. The use of shadows give then an almost-3D feel, IMO. Or not. I'm just wondering if maybe they could be a little "flatter" somehow?

Edit 3:
No wait, I have one more: I think Sheet's icon look a bit too busy. Maybe the details, especially in the spreadsheet in the lower half, could be reduced a bit?

There is actually a second set of icons for Calligra I'm not posting which did follow exactly what you mentioned (strong colour coding, etc) but was ultimately turned down. The main issue is that they looked generic when compared to Libre and MS Office. It also meant we had two choices; either follow the Libre pallet and be more generic, or follow the Calligra pallet and have confusing icons (someone used to clicking green for calc would accidentally launch flow doing the same thing). The Calligra team also mentioned usability concerns for users who may have had trouble seeing the glyphs on the icons, and that there was also no silhouettes. Also, not all mimetype icons are the same colour per class of icon; so they wouldn't be colour co-ordinated with the relevant Calligra icons...

I'll play around with the sheets icon to clean it up though.

Hi, I think these icons are very nice, in particular Author's one is very very cool.
Just a note: the icon of Karbon has little vibrant color than the other icons, is not it?

alex-l wrote:Hi, I think these icons are very nice, in particular Author's one is very very cool.
Just a note: the icon of Karbon has little vibrant color than the other icons, is not it?

*nods*
I'll re-saturate 'er.

Kver wrote:There is actually a second set of icons for Calligra I'm not posting which did follow exactly what you mentioned (strong colour coding, etc) but was ultimately turned down. The main issue is that they looked generic when compared to Libre and MS Office. It also meant we had two choices; either follow the Libre pallet and be more generic, or follow the Calligra pallet and have confusing icons (someone used to clicking green for calc would accidentally launch flow doing the same thing). The Calligra team also mentioned usability concerns for users who may have had trouble seeing the glyphs on the icons, and that there was also no silhouettes. Also, not all mimetype icons are the same colour per class of icon; so they wouldn't be colour co-ordinated with the relevant Calligra icons...

I'll play around with the sheets icon to clean it up though.

Would it be possible to see the second set as well? And why was it turned down? I don't understand your explanation for why it would have been a problem with a green Sheets icon.

I think a lot of people will go for the colours, rather than the glyphs of the icons, so for usability I really think we should try and stick with the "standard". I don't have any actual data though, but I've observed friends and family going for the colours, and sometimes launching similarly coloured icons by mistake.

And on the same track, to achieve colour coordination with the mimetype icons I'd much rather see that we changed the mimetypes to match, than the other way around.

I really think it is a huge win, both for usability and recognition, to use the standard icon colours...

veqz wrote:Would it be possible to see the second set as well? And why was it turned down? I don't understand your explanation for why it would have been a problem with a green Sheets icon.

I think a lot of people will go for the colours, rather than the glyphs of the icons, so for usability I really think we should try and stick with the "standard". I don't have any actual data though, but I've observed friends and family going for the colours, and sometimes launching similarly coloured icons by mistake.

And on the same track, to achieve colour coordination with the mimetype icons I'd much rather see that we changed the mimetypes to match, than the other way around.

I really think it is a huge win, both for usability and recognition, to use the standard icon colours...

I'm sorry but I won't be posting the other icons; the Calligra team already expressed their preference for what I posted, and I'd like to keep the thread focused on them. I only have a couple more days to get feedback on the icons before I need to push them into the repos, and I don't think an already rejected set of icons stealing the discussion would help things.

The way the mimetype icons are coloured means that a spreadsheet icon might have different colours for each type of spreadsheet; so we can't really colour co-ordinate anyway. Someone else mentioned that since other programs open those files, colour co-ordinating for just one or two suites means we would be discluding other suites or individual applications...

The Glyph/colour thing has been mentioned to Uri, and I hate to 'not my department' ya, but you'll probably want to reignite that thread or mention it to Uri. Either way, I don't think overhauling the way he planned mimetypes would be appropriate at this point, and this close to artwork freeze.

Well, alright...

I don't have any more comments then. They all look quite good, and if you manage to "debusify" the Sheets icon and maybe do something about the depth-feeling for Flow, Kexi and Stage, I'd think they're pretty perfect (except for my disagreement on the colours).

Alrighty, so I finished the tweaks requested, and here's the modified icons:

• For Flow I tweaked the gradients and where the shadows show up so the points of the arrows are "above" the ends. I also increased the contrast as much as the palette would allow me.
• Karbon is switched to a purple gradient found in several other icons.
• For Kexi the surfaces visible through the gaps were made much darker so they would more obviously break things up.
• Sheets saw a near re-do; ditched the graph-on-graph, added a background, decreased the number of bars, and switched from a lined grid to alternating rows.
• Words was tightened up in general, and the pen was made darker to stand out from the white. Added the piece of bottom-metal found in higher-quality pens making the well more obvious.

So if there are any last-microsecond tweaks they'll be open until they get get merged into main; mostly I just need to get any tweaks before I start upsetting people for causing extra pulls.

On a side note, I feel like a total [CENSORED] every time I visit this thread for not posting the coloured icons, so I'm posting them below purely for historical purposes. They have already been shot down.



Please, please don't make a design discussion around them. They're already dead. I just don't want to feel like an [CENSORED] for not posting them. :/

Those revisions are pretty good. I especially like the improvements to Sheets.

And I know this is too late and everything, but since I just can't let dead dogs lie, here's a sketch of what I would have suggested in some alternate universe where my design skills were better and I got in on the design earlier:



...

Does anyone know, whether In the future, it would be possible to have some user test for whether to use the MS Office/LibreOffice colour scheme?