Joachim Frieben wrote:
"Bluecurve" has friendly, crisp looking icons due to a well chosen color
scheme, consistent perspective, and noticeable outlines which improve
contrast. Icons are pictograms and as such -simplified- images of real
objects with the aim of easy recognizability. Photorealistic icons are
rather counterproductive, especially at small sizes. The "cartoonish" look
of "Bluecurve" exactly fits this paradigm. In the "GNOME" panels and menus,
a mere 24 pixels is the default size. This has to be kept in mind.
The attached screenshot shows the huge difference between "good" and "bad"
design. The "Bluecurve" package icon is much more distinct than the "puplet"
one (the latter is too small anyway). The new "gnome-power-manager" is
particularly poor. It looks slack and fuzzy and is weakly detached from the
background. The dropshadow make things rather worse. The screenshot speaks
for itself, doesn't it?
We do have options in terms of giving the new icons more clarity at smaller
sizes. Modifying the palette to be a bit brighter is a good idea. Also, we can
institute a guideline of changing the perspective of icons to be 'dead on' at
sizes 24 px or less (and keep them isometric at sizes > 24 px)
When I mocked up the puplet icons, I did both a 'dead on' perspective version
and isometric version but the feedback I received was that people preferred the
isometric version.
(You can see the 'dead on' perspective versions of the package icon here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/NewIconDevelopment?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=puplet-updatesavailable-mizmo.png
(towards the upper left of the grid of 24 x 24 icons)
~m
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