Hi all,
it's been a while since we have done anything... Given that I'm currently the
only one who's currently doing anything on Echo icons (if anyone else is doing
something, please speak up!), I thought it's undesirable to keep developing
two concurrent icon themes. I'd like to obsolete the former Echo Icon Theme
with Echo Perspective. I've done the most necessary changes on wiki already
and closed old tickets mostly with WontFix resolution. My goal is to keep
depending in Echo Perspective on Echo Icon Theme until until we've covered
what's missing and then fully obsolete Echo Icon Theme by it. Probably the
last update to Echo Icon Theme will be adding symlinks to cover xdg folders.
It's strange when there's a combination of yellowbrown echo folders with grey
gnome folders...
I would also like to shift our focus from Gnome Desktop Environment to Xfce
as our primary target because Gnome is having too different goals from us
(we're going for modern, detailed and vibrant colours, while gnome goes
mostly B&W with symbolic icons...). Of course I'll be myself creating
primarily icons to cover apps I use ;-)
I also intend to re-factor the guidelines once again to reflect our changed
goals and to do some clarifications and updates.
What I'm thinking about so far:
-------------------------------
1. Remove guidelines that do not apply to Echo Perspective. This would cover
only the Projections guidelines section.
2. New expanded and normalized colour palette. It's directly based on both
old icons (including the original ones from Diana!) and our current colour
palette, but has more shades of various colours and is "normalized" WRT
CIE Lab colour space (the shades are equidistant in Hue and Chroma, and
then clamped [by keeping Hue and Luma and decreasing Chroma] to sRGB,
between darkest and lightest shade in Lab). This means the new palette is
properly colour managed (absolute rendering intent) and is saved in sRGB
colour space.
If you'd like to play yourself with these things I recommend CIE Color
Calculator by Bruce Lindbloom (and the whole site for more theoretical
info on colour spaces). [1] I also attach the new palette in SVG and Gimp
palette formats (GPL).
In addition to this, two sets of colours are adjacent to each other and
can be used together as if they were one -- dark brown and light brown;
red and orange (actually this is red through orange to yellow) -- this one
is a little departure from original plain-red shades in the current
guideline. It wasn't actually used in the original icons, though.
3. More descriptive guidelines for projections. As creating icons with
perspective is harder to get consistent than with isometric or
whatever-metric projections I suggest adding a guideline on how to create
near-flat icons (arrows, dialogue icons, ...). While creating a rather big
set of icons myself I discovered that this can be easily achieved by
duplicating canvas size and icon front face and scaling+moving them as
one. The duplicated and edited front face becomes naturally a back face
and then we just proceed to pixel-snap it and to connect those two together
to create 3D a object. If the canvas is scaled and moved with the same
factors, than all the icons have the same perspective and share the same
thickness, which is what we want. In the attached PNG image this is
illustrated (only the duplication+resize and move, no pixel snapping,
gradient edit or 3D-ing). The values are:
canvas W×H new W×H move X×Y
-----------------------------------------
256×256 246×246 (+5)×(+12)
128×128 124×124 (+2)×(+6)
64×64 62×62 (+1)×(+3)
48×48 46.4×46.4 (+0.8)×(+2.3)
32×32 31×31 (+0.5)×(+1.6)
4. Include more sizes. We'd support creating 16×16, 22×22 (24×24), 32×32,
48×48, 64×64, 128×128 and 256×256. The attached PNG from point 3. is
showing these. It's some added effort, but looks like at least some of
these is becoming more common. We'd require 16×16 to 48×48 and *at least*
one of the bigger ones with the requirement that if not all are created,
than the smallest should look clear at 64×64 as well, i.e would be pixel
snapped to 64×64 canvas. This is easy to do in inkscape. Alternatively we
could require 64×64 instead of "one of the bigger ones", but the former
has the advantage that we can focus on the most used size if we know it.
I'm pondering whether to allow arbitrary sizes -- e.g. when you know your
icon is often used at some other size. I'd say the best would be to
discourage (by not offering one-canvas template with different sizes than
the above mentioned) but allow on case by case basis provided good reason
is given.
5. One canvas -- allow creating more icons on one canvas. I think it is very
good for icon groups (similar icons, usually used together). My idea is
that each icon would have its own layer called artwork-<icon-name>, then a
yet-to-be-written script would separate these (when building the theme) and
then proceed to generate PNGs as usual. One of the great advantages is
that you can share most of the work in one SVG (reuse gradients, shapes,
etc.), you'd just have to avoid cloning in-between the layers to keep it
working. A WIP using this method is available [2].
6. Change inner outline (guideline) to have rounded edges (as if it were a
thick line with round join and round ends). IMHO it looks better and newer
icons were already using that. Suggested thickness is:
16×16 to 32×32 1 px, 48×48 and 64×64 2 px, the rest is scaled 64×64.
Please read through these changes and offer your comments, I'll start
implementing them in the meanwhile. If there's enough opposition and I'll
have already done some change, I can always revert it back ;-)
Thanks,
Martin
References:
[1] http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?ColorCalculator.html
[2] http://mso.fedorapeople.org/echo-perspective/new/
Hi,
I've prepared another version of the computer icon set. This time I
designed the keyboard completely from scratch :D The body is supposed to
be metallic and to be wireless... The imaginary keys' lift (or stroke or
whatever is the correct English word) is supposed to be short hence the
keys aren't tall.
See the attached screen-shot for how it looks on desktop, the icon
itself is here:
http://mso.fedorapeople.org/echo-perspective/computer.pnghttp://mso.fedorapeople.org/echo-perspective/computer.svg
Comments and "forks" welcome,
Martin
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I finally managed to find a time to create a new echo-perspective emote
based on emote template.
Comment welcome.
- --
Luya Tshimbalanga
Graphic & Web Designer
E: luya(a)fedoraproject.org
W: http://www.thefinalzone.net
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Hi,
while working on a new icon (I will post it in next mail) I discovered
some problems with icon-artist and echo-artist scripts they have with
newer versions of rubygems that are currently in fedora repos and a bug
in one of the echo-artist scripts so I've fixed the issues and built new
packages. You can get them here:
http://mso.fedorapeople.org/packages/RPMS/noarch/
It would be very helpful if you could test the apps (especially the gtk
ones, that can get started via nautilus) and report back
issues/suggestions.
I also created some WIP screencasts for the two new gtk apps. If anyone
would volunteer to do some basic cutting and/or maybe adding some audio
or subtitle commentary it would be awesome! The current versions of the
screencasts are:
http://mso.fedorapeople.org/screencasts/echo-icon-new-gtk.ogvhttp://mso.fedorapeople.org/screencasts/echo-icon-add-gtk.ogv
Thanks,
Martin
Hi all,
so after more than two weeks of waiting for feedback where we received
one positive and none negative I've decided to make the new guidelines
gold. So from now on, you can refer to this page:
https://fedorahosted.org/echo-icon-theme/wiki/Guidelines
as *the* echo project guidelines :)
I hope this, together with finishing the reworked echo-artist scripts (I
think I'm finally at that stage where I can think about putting it in
repos and uploading some screencasts), will help us to gain some
momentum in the Echo Project icon design :)
Happy designing,
Martin
Hi all,
thanks to me catching a cold, I've found some time over yesterday and
today to finish the Guidelines draft. I also moved the pages to their
final location and moved the current guidelines off of wiki:Guidelines
which basically means we entered the last stage.
So I'd request from all of you to go through the guidelines, correct any
obvious mistakes, discuss possible better wordings, navigation, etc. I
initially propose about a week for feedback and quality checking. If no
significant shortcomings appear during that time and enough people would
be satisfied with them, I'll make them *the* Guidelines by next Monday
(2010/05/10).
And to not forget, here's what's up for review:
https://fedorahosted.org/echo-icon-theme/wiki/Guidelines
and here's where the current guidelines were moved to:
https://fedorahosted.org/echo-icon-theme/wiki/Guidelines/DeprecatedMay2010
Thanks,
Martin
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A new version of preferences-desktop-accessibility based on both gnome
and oxygen icon themes. The handicap symbol has been dropped
comparatively to Echo version. Comments welcome.
- --
Luya Tshimbalanga
Graphic & Web Designer
E: luya(a)fedoraproject.org
W: http://www.thefinalzone.net
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Hi all,
I've finished initial design of the gtk version of echo-icon-add script.
It is half working -- you can select where to add it to, what icon to
add (it checks the icon beforehand), it allows you to select component
(combo box) and branches (list supporting multi-selection) to which
you'd like to push it to and a checkbox to tick whether you also want to
push it to fedorahosted or do the changes only localy. However, the
"Add" button currently only prints the selected options to the terminal
(for testing purposes) instead of actually committing the icon to git.
It would be nice if you could test the so far implemented functionality
and report back if it's easy and effective to use and any bugs you run
into (as well as suggestions).
First you'll need git version of icon artist (I needed to do some coding
there to allow proper error and warnings handling during icon check):
http://mso.fedorapeople.org/packages/RPMS/noarch/ruby-icon-artist-0.1.93-0.…
Then save the attached script, chmod +x it and run it from terminal and
start testing. Note that you'll need a local copy of the echo git repo
(preferably in ~/Projects/echo-icon-theme/git), otherwise it refuses to
start ;-)
I also attach a screenshot.
Thanks,
Martin
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Two versions available so you decide the best one.
- --
Luya Tshimbalanga
Graphic & Web Designer
E: luya(a)fedoraproject.org
W: http://www.thefinalzone.net
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