Re: New Icon Set...[echo]...

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Thought i'd weigh in with a different opinion..

Personally i'm wildly enthusiastic about the new icon theme, their stylish and give a professional and 'finished' and 'high quality' look to Fedora. I'm counting the days until we can have this set completed so i can leave the old Bluecurve icon set behind.

Now the critique that these icons do not work well as small icons, well i don't know if you ever noticed but normally an icon has 2 or 3 versions, one thats more 'photo realistic' for the large view (nautlius browsing, control-center, etc), and a smaller version for the places which you indicate, toolbar menu's and panel menu's etc..

These smaller icons are 'simplified' versions of their larger brothers and sisters since in so few pixels its very hard to convey so much graphical information, and as you pointed out, when you try to convey so much information in just a few pixels, it just becomes kind of a paint blob.. hence the column 'Small' at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/BluecurveAndBeyond/Gallery Not filled in yet, but i presume that this column will be filled-in in time with the smaller simplified versions of the icons, which don't turn into 'paint blobs' in 22x22 pixels.. even perspective might sometimes be 'flat' in the smaller icons to, as you point out, have max visual information room in such a small area.

As an example (and the same is true for all icon sets) look at: http://www.iconbase.com/iconbase/aero.html See how the smallest icons are much simplified from their larger versions, and even loose perspective?

Of course they are valid points that should be thought of (small version of the icons) but to write "to be brutally honest, this is a huge step down from bluecurve" sounds to like an intend to be negative and not fair nor honest.

My 0.2$

    -- Chris Chabot

David Nielsen wrote:
lør, 05 08 2006 kl. 11:44 -0400, skrev Diana Fong:
  
Chris Chabot wrote:
    
Hi Diana,

I'm still getting:"Attachment 'echo_0.10.tar.gz' does not exist!" on 
the wiki page.

   -- Chris
      
Gah!  The whole Fedoraproject.org site not even loading at the moment.  O_O
Though just before it broke, I checked and the file doesn't exist 
anymore.  Nor does any record of it exit in the wiki's history.  I'm 
baffled...and a bit worried about what else might be lost but haven't 
been noticed.

Ok, I've loaded the temporarily to...

SVG+PNG:  http://people.redhat.com/dfong/icons/echo_0.10b.zip
48x48 PNG: http://people.redhat.com/dfong/icons/echo48_0.10b.zip
48x48 png images packaged as an icon theme by Leon: 
http://people.redhat.com/dfong/icons/Echo.tar.gz

Diana
ps. the "b" version is not the same as the original, I've included the 
recent icons submitted in there as well...it's only about 8 more than 
last time...Leon's tar is based on the original set.
    

The following might seem cruel, I apologize in advance.

The icons look decent when they are big but when applied to my desktop
it's a completely different case. The highlights on the back/forth
buttons makes them look washed out and faint, in other words really
really bad, like they have no outline, no shape. The size difference
between those icons and the pause one makes the pause button look HUGE
and very defined, it just doesn't look like they are meant to fit
together. The size relation issue seems to be fairly common, a good way
to see this issue is going to the Theme settings applet and look at the
difference between the Install icon and the remove icon. Add is HUGE it
also has a strange highlight effect that makes it look a bit odd (it
looks bigger in the buttom than the top - color choice causes this I
suspect), the remove icon just below it looks like a tiny blue blob of
paint.

When looking in the menus it doesn't get much better, the prespective
makes the icons look small and the amount of details turns them into
tiny blobs of paint, it's literally impossible to tell what information
the icons are trying to convey. Which is after all the purpose of icons,
without the explanatory text next them it's close to impossible tell the
purpose - to simulate, set your language to something you can't read and
try to navigate the menus.. not a fun experience to be honest. The
biggest offenders here would be the Office and Graphics entries. 

Compared to the current Bluecurve icons Echo seems to lack clearly
defined outlines which makes them much less usable especially at small
sizes, likes those we use by default in our menus - the single most used
iconsize on the Fedora desktop as far as I can tell.  

I admire the effort but honestly if this makes the default desktop for
FC6 I feel it would do the users a major disservice. It would hurt
usability for the majority of users, especially those of us with
slightly less than perfect eyesight.

There is sadly no nice way to say this, so in the interest of being
brutally honest for the good of our users. Echo is plagued with issues
and is only a giantic step down from Bluecurve or Tango visually. The
icons look decent only when they are huge like the way they are
displayed on the wiki but on the actual desktop they are nothing short
of a disaster.

My apologies for any hurt egos,
David

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