tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

1. 

   Bill
   March 31st, 2007 - 16:36

   How about making sure that Tango has all icons needed by KDE?
2. 

   Sean Luke
   April 1st, 2007 - 18:46

   The icons look very nice and it’s clear you’ve done a lot of hard work trying to keep them consistent and relatively iconic rather than pictographic. Allow me some criticisms with regard to their use on small devices like the 770 and the N800. I wrote the N800 GUI criticism at http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/

   These devices have (0) very small, high resolution screens with (1) white backgrounds which (2) get washed out in bright sun or other conditions and (3) are intended for a broad audience consisting of people who don’t know what “Linux” means and thus don’t know some of its more arcane conventions and iconography.

   Given these three facts, there are some difficulties with the icons for use on these devices:

   - The icons often have pale colors. As a random example, document-new and document-properties and format-justify-center will be all but invisible on a white background. Most of your colored icons are fairly washed out, pale blues and grays and greens which no doubt look *handsome* on a large LCD attached to a standard Linux box but not on the N800. These icons desperately need to take advantage of the fact that these PDAs are in *color*, and particularly bold color, to stand out in difficult-to-read situations and especially against the typically white backdrop on which they are placed (in the N800’s button bar). Another thing that might help is to put a dark halo behind them, the opposite of the light halos that appear behind the black lettering in MacOS X when it must appear in front of possibly dark backgrounds.

   - The icons have thin lines. This too causes them to be very difficult to read in low-visibility situations, particularly as the 770 and N800 have such high resolution screens which make those lines extremely small indeed. Your icons should have double or even triple width lines almost everywhere — it *radically* improves readability on PDAs. Since I did a study comparing the N800 and the Newton on this particular point, you might as well go check it out for some examples of the difference in readablity between the two when it comes to line width.

   - The standard icon sizes are too small for these high-DPI screens. Your largest size appears to be 32×32 for the standard icons: but in environments like this, 40×40 and 48×48 and 64×64 would *really* be welcome. 32×32 is really VERY small on the N800. Many crucial icon elements will also be so small as to be unreadable: for example, edit-select-all’s iconographic I-bar will be illegible.

   - A number of the icons are somewhat arcane. Linux typically puts a “star” or a “sunburst” on things to indicate “new document”, a notion which I think non-Linux-users find utterly confusing. It doesn’t look like a “new” document, it looks like a document which has just received a Gold-Star Award. (MacOS X has lately been using “+” and “-”). Other oddities in the icon set you have above include two DIFFERENT icons for stuff coming out of the trash. No one could possibly distinguish between them. LIkewise two different icons for stuff coming out of a floppy disk — huh? Not to mention the fact that the N800 doesn’t HAVE a floppy disk, and indeed many computers don’t any more either. The power plug plugged-in icon doesn’t look like a power plug in a socket: it looks like some kind of bell jar or dinner cover. Etc.

   - It appears that the icon set you have above is totally different from Tango’s sets on their (http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Library) Library page or in their (http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Gallery) Gallery. I sense some synchronization problem.

   I hope these were helpful comments. Good luck with an important project!

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