In any case, Sean, your points are very correct and we have been reading your newton comparison with good interest, very good points. I am maintaining the theme template now, and I share your feeling about arrows

The DPI thing is also something I have been thinking about, since high dpi does make icons appear different. We need to start thinking about physical size in user interface design, not just pixels. For example, a 16×16 pixel icon in the N800 screen will fit under the tip of the stylus..

If you have good ideas for metaphors and such, please contribute to the Tango project, there is also this “unify the metaphors” side to this in free software that we know needs to be done, but a bunch of artists can do a limited number of things at once Your help would be very much appreciated there, and you seem to have good background knowledge that would really help!

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!