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Icons 3.0 begin testing for Luna
Submitted by DanRabbit on Wed, 12/28/2011 - 18:59As you all know, we've been traveling a long road from Jupiter to Luna. One of the goals targeted for this release is a massive overhaul of our icon theme. It's still in the works, but I'd like to preview for you some of the big changes, talk about some of the reasons behind changes, and show you where you can go to test out the new icons and help track down any problems introduced in the latest revision.
Reduction of Symlinks
On free desktops like elementary, we have a fundamental problem: there is a lot of fragmentation around icon names. This happens when a desktop environment decides to add a prefix to it's icon names (xfce-whatever), or when a toolkit decides to add a prefix (gtk-whatever), or when erroneous words are included (STOCK_whatever). And what happens is that people who make icon themes end up adding symbolic links (or symlinks; a shortcut or alias) into their themes in order to try to cover all of these duplicate icon names. Well, I've just about had enough of this nonsense. It's pretty difficult to maintain an icon theme with thousands of symlinks filling it up. So for 3.0 I'm going to stick as closely as humanly possible to only the most sane, common, and desktop/toolkit/whatever-agnostic icon names I can find. This means that the icon theme will be much smaller in terms of number of files, it should be more stable in terms of not having to watch out for broken symlinks, and it should be much easier to maintain since there is less to worry about.
Symbolic Icons
One of the coolest new things in icon tech lately is Symbolic icons. These are the flat single-colored icons that we see becoming so popular on mobile devices. They're great in status bars and text entries, in panels and inline toolbars, and many other places. But until now, as icon designers we've had a huge problem with them: Black icons don't show on Black backgrounds and vice versa. But now, using the -symbolic icon name space, we can design icons that adapt their color with your theme and look great on dark or light backgrounds.
File Type Icons
File Type icons (also called mimetype icons) saw quite a few changes this cycle. The most noticeable change is the removal of the old page curls on document files. There are also a number of other stylistic changes such as using the same note shape as BeatBox, better color distinction between different mimetypes, better support for common mimetypes, etc. These new icons should be much more immediately recognizeable and look a whole lot better.
Lighting and Color
Something I've really been working on this cycle is having much better lighting and color. You'll notice that the old accessibility icon and the old playlist icon above use a completely different blue, but the new ones use the same shade of blue. It's one of those nice consistency things. You'll also notice that the new blue is much more vibrant and alive. It isn't like the old dull color.
Clearly Distinguishing Between Similar Icons
Other important changes center around the use of Shape and Color as a distinguisher. With the icons above (dialog-warning vs dialog-error), the color was changed to better reflect the "threat level" (warning as yellow, reserving red for errors) and the shape was changed to make it much more clear which icon this is and what situation you have arrived at.
And Much Much More
You really have to see all the changes for yourself. If you're a brave daily PPA tester, you should see the update soon (if not already). If you're not yet using our daily or testing PPA, a word of caution: It's called the cutting edge for a reason. Icon themes are not a game. Using the daily ppa could literally render your system completely useless. I recommend either waiting for a more stable release or using a secondary machine to test. With that said, you can examine our testing ppa here and add it to your system if you so desire.
Please remember that this is the beginning of a testing cycle, so you will encounter problems. Please report your problems. There may be regressions introduced in this revision. Happy testing, and thanks a bunch :)
I dont really like the battery icon on the Wingpanel, I want it stay in horizontally (not vertically) as in most of icon theme.I also want all the icons on Wingpanel are in Monopolic color (dark or light). Thx for your care!
Awesome! (:
I like the new warning icon (:
so beautiful
I like the general direction outlines above, but I'd be wary of overusing that vibrant blue colour in the icon suite. For example, the new desktop icon looks garish cf. the old one (which I prefer), and were this vibrant blue applied to the folder icon(s) they would look equally as garish (one of the reason's I don't like the oxygen icon theme).
Oddly though, the vibrant blue mime-type icon and accessibility icon's (shown above) don't look too garish to me. Perhaps because they are shown out of context above, or perhaps because they are contrasted by white detailing (rather than the black detailing of the new desktop icon).
To surmise: Be wary of eye strain. :-p
I think the plan is to do something else entirely for the folders, perhaps something more like the folders on Plank. I don't think we're too happy about ANY blue folder icons; they're just too much.
It's "vice versa". Not "VISA versa"...
lol, VISA versa.
I really like the look of these. Excellent work!
The icon set it's very good! Congratulations!
As a early tester, I already instaled it on my Oneiric. It's awesome. I'm already filing some bugs, thought.
One thing: There is some elementary mailing list or other like that? This journal is nice, but it doesn't updates frequently. I would like to stay more in touch with the process of Luna's development.
Thanks and congratulations once again!
You could subscribe to the Journal via RSS like me: http://elementaryos.org/journal/rss.xml
Development mailing list is the ML of this Launchpad team: https://launchpad.net/~elementary-dev-community
Thanks for the bug reports!
now if gtk can support toolbars with symbolic icons...
Actually, in GTK+ you can use a symbolic icon wherever you want :)
The tricky part is theming it properly.
Pretty sure its up to the app to support them. All the app has to do is look for some-icon-symbolic.svg and the icon has to provide them. :)
I think.
You're correct :)
Very nice, the only thing I found is that the hard drive symbolic icon looks alien.
Symbolic document-copy is also a bit alien
Symbolic harddisk icon is tailored for a particular use case when looking consistently with usual icon is more important than consistency with other symbolic icons
Reduction of symlinks... So that basically means that the users are going to have to create all those symlinks manually if they don't want to stare at an "icon not found" box every five minutes? Such a decision wouldn't be bad if you could actually patch something so that it would still show the icons, but I'm guessing you aren't going to do that.
It's important to also realize that this is WELL-ADVERTISED as being a testing PPA. We won't ship a broken iconset to the main PPA. Which is why we have testing PPAs. so we can fix the things that are broken.
But yeah, if non-DE-specific apps are using DE-specific icons, then that's a bug with that app and it'll be reported where needed.
We're going to stop adapting to every stupid icon name made up out there and force apps use sane icon naming instead. It may have negative short-term effects, but will benefit all parties in the long run.
Hooray for the changes. I like how you put usability above all else, it's what matters in the end.
hm, why is my elementary-mono-dark directory in /usr/share/icons now empty :/ ? I dont wanna have white icons in the topmenu bar... or better: I want a black panel in unity.
-mono-color icons are ugly workarounds. The proper solution is symbolic icons, but Ubuntu doesn't use them yet.
I've always been a fan of the elementary folder icons and monochrome indicators, but the colorful media controls were a bit unprofessional in my view. Glad to see the new versions. Great work.
The media controls are still colorful, those are just the symbolic versions you're seeing.
every major browser is going with monochrome toolbar icons... hopefully filemanagers and browsers like Midori follow suite and go symbolic soon, now that the option is system-wide
All it takes is an elementary touch to make things look even better! It looks really neat! It really suits the elementary way of doing things!
I like the slight shift in colour to make it more alive and vibrant and I'll be trying out the PPA soon. I agree with what cassudy said about the article showing improvements from Jupiter to Luna. The elementary window, gtk and shell theme look so polished on gnome shell, I'm sure the official theme will look even better and smoother on its designated DE, can;t wait for Luna.
Sam Tate said he'd work on some screencasts of our apps and the current state of the DE; perhaps I can convince him to take screenshots, then compare them with Jupiter ones, too? I'm sure Dan and/or I could do a writeup for it.
Looking fantastic!
Are you planning to add icons for LibreOffice? Even though it doesn't use gtk natively it still is the best office suite on Linux and I guess many will use that instead of Gnome office.
There should already be icons for libreoffice documents. If one of them isn't working, file a bug report and attach an example document so I can figure out what's going on :)
Actually I meant the application icons, not the ones for odf.
Like the app icon that you'd see in the dock or Slingshot? If so, then that's not the job of a system icon designer; the app provides its own icons. If you mean the icons within the app itself, that, too isn't the job of a system icon designer, unless the system ships with LibreOffice. If someone wanted to port the iconset to a LibreOffice one, I don't think anyone would complain, though.
Very exciting! I love the direction of the icons; very modern, sleek, and unified. w00t. I'd definitely be interested in an article showing off the design improvements as a whole from Jupiter to Luna with side-by-side comparisons like this article. The icons, GTK2->3, and other tweaks are all really making Luna beautiful.
There's much more going on under the hood than on the surface, so side-by-side is not going to be that impressive.
I think there's a lot going on in both places. :)
Comparing Jupiter with its GNOME Panel and first-generation elementary apps using GTK2 and the old icons with Luna using WingPanel and the second-generation elementary apps using GTK3 and the new icons does make a pretty significant difference.
So what is the rationale behind removing the page curl on file type icons?
Also, will the removal of symlinks not cause the icon theme to break, i.e. for the elementary icons not to show up in some places?
A couple of reasons, the main one being that it's not exactly easy to draw. It's difficult to get it to appear right at all sizes, it's time consuming to crop out a corner of your icon, and it's difficult for third parties to imitate if they need to ship a new mime type icon. Another reason is just that it's not necessary. It doesn't really make the icon feel more file-y. So in the grand scheme of things, it's just visual noise in the file browser. Yes, it probably will cause breaks and regressions in some cases and we'll need to work with upstream developers to make sure we iron out all of these issues. In most cases it means that upstream developers need to use common icon names instead of the gtk/xfce/STOCK/etc ones. But in some cases it will mean that we've selected the wrong icon name and changes will need to made in the theme. In the end, what we're going to end up with is a theme that's easier to maintain and a win for icon themers in general since app developers will be using the same common icon names.
That looks great...!!! but have you ever thought about design elementary fonts just like ubuntu font
The Droid Sans used in Jupiter was quite good. I think they'll continue with that.
Designing a font is a huge project. It's easy to just do English characters, but as soon as you start to support other languages (like we do) it becomes a huge project. Especially when you get into supporting Chinese and Japanese characters the project grows out of control. Suddenly you're working with thousands and thousands of characters instead of just 26.
I have some doubts...On the one hand, fyle type icons now suit best with the rest of Luna because the main color is blue. On the other hand, the previous variant was slicker and prettier.
Not all file types are blue.
I'm not on an elementary install right now... which file types are which colors? :D
AWSOMMMMMMMM! I like a lot the new blue