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/
On Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:23:22 +0100 Martin Sourada wrote:
- 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)
I've just explained this in more detail in my new (we)b(-)log post using the go-bottom 32×32 icon as an example: http://mso-chronicles.blogspot.cz/2013/02/consistent-perspective-in-group-of...
Comments and suggestions are welcomed, Martin
Martin Sourada wrote:
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.
This is a sane approach, keep focused and don't spread the resources thin.
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 ;-)
Make sense. If someone is interested in both Echo Perspective and GNOME, he can join and do the needed work.
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 ;-)
No objection, it looks like you have a solid plan.
echo-icon-theme@lists.fedorahosted.org