FYI. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jakub Steiner <jimmac@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 2:03 PM Subject: state of the icon theme To: desktop-devel-list@xxxxxxxxx Cc: Tango Artists List <Tango-artists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> After chatting with Jon McCann on IRC the other day it came up people are confused about the icon theme situation. Turns out there may be designers who would like to contribute icon artwork upstream, but aren't sure what project exactly. As most of the people involved in the Tango project are also heavily involved with the gnome-art project, it's perhaps hard to see why both projects exist. The Tango project is about defining the 'neutral' common ground in terms of icon style. It aims to provide guidelines to any free software developer as to how to style their application icons. A side project is the icon naming spec [2] defining the core desktop icon set in terms of naming and metaphors. Tango's aim _isn't_ creation of an all-encompassing icon theme that everybody should use. Tango-icon-theme was the first implementation of the style guidelines and has actually made writing the guidelines possible. Sadly its existence made many people think Tango project is about creating this icon theme. The original plan was that this base desktop theme would be used by the two main desktop environments KDE and GNOME. That sadly didn't happen. On top of that, the CCBYSA license chosen for the theme also prevented derived icons to be shipped with GPLed projects and some distributions even refused to ship the standalone theme. Thus for the GNOME project some of us continued to apply the Tango style to the existing gnome-icon-theme. Recently Novell has agreed to put all the assets from the old tango-icon-theme into public domain to allow the creation of what we call the tango-icon-library[3]. Along with the style guidelines these assets will help 3rd party developers to create their icon artwork and help spread the adoption of the style. Tango artists have worked with many upstream projects to have their icon artwork follow the style guidelines in the past. We have projects like Pidgin, GIMP, GNOME, Firefox, Scribus following the style. Sadly KDE project chose not to follow the guidelines when creating their base icon theme Oxygen, but their style is not that far away, especially taking into account the future enhancements to the style I'll talk about. There has been some criticism of the Tango style to be outdated and non-modern. While I certainly don't identify with that, we have experimented with adding a high resolution variant of the icons. No style guideline has been written yet, but it's essentially a highly detailed, almost photo-realistic look for high density displays and some other special cases. We are at a point where this style can be somewhat described and put into the Tango style guidelines as an optional size. Just like with the original tango-icon-theme, to iterate the final style for the high resolution icons, we have created and been working on an icon theme codenamed Mango [4]. This theme is currently developed in a git repository on freedesktop, but with the past experience I think this should become the next iteration of the GNOME desktop base icon theme and move to gnome svn/infrastructure rather than aiming to make this a common/fallback/hicolor theme [5]. So to answer the original question -- if you're a designer looking to work on upstream projects -- to minimize the duplicity of work we're doing -- pick any free software project that is in need of icon art and make sure it follows the Tango style guidelines. GNOME is one of such projects and the new icon theme will need a lot of work in the area of high resolution alternatives. We would surely welcome any help from experienced designers who actually do exist in free software companies as I have recently found out. Discussions about the style should be happening on the tango-artists mailing list [6], matters around the gnome-icon-theme should be discussed on the gnome-themes list [7]. I hope this summary makes up for the long "radio silence". [1] http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines [2] http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-latest.html [3] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/tango/tango-icon-library/ [4] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/tango/tango-icon-theme/ [5] We need to discuss this with KDE/Oxygen people [6] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/tango-artists [7] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-themes-list _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list _______________________________________________ Fedora-art-list mailing list Fedora-art-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-art-list
