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List:       kde-artists
Subject:    K-ARTIST:About good icons
From:       Torsten Rahn <tackat () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-01-26 15:11:02
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A very common assumption about icons is that they have to be really beautiful 
cool tiny little pictures which *r3wl* and are as photorealistic as possible. 
Actually if this was the case KDE would have looked already a _HUGE LOT_ more 
beautiful by now because it's quite easy to create such icons (I'm sure it 
would even be the most beautiful icons/interface around).

Unfortunately the whole deal about icons is much more complicated:

Icons have to guide the user through the interface pretty fast. To make sure 
that they are _good_ icons which are easy to recognize they have got to be 
designed in a way that is quite similar in certain aspects to the design of 
traffic-designs.

When I was a child there still did exist traffic signs in germany which showed 
a steamengine to make people aware that a train might cross the street (see 
pic. a).

The train being shown on those signs looked extremely simple. So I thought: 
"Germany must be a very _very_ poor country: Obviously that steam-engine has 
been designed by somebody who was artistically impaired." 
Being a very generous and artistically skilled 8 year-old I thought: "I can do 
better - for free!" and did a "much better" traffic sign (see pic. b.).
Unfortunately my proposal for a "much better traffic sign" has been rejected: 
due to the fact that it was 3D (even including a perspective) and had way too 
many details it was too hard to recognize it from a distance (see pic. b. 
right part)
Some years later steam engines were really rare and people weren't used to 
them anymore. So the steam engine wasn't an appropriate symbol anymore.
Unfortunately modern trains don't look very characteristic from the side so 
they had to choose (see pic. c.) a semi-3D-perspective (which is quite an 
exception if you look at 
http://www.landkreis-goslar.de/SERVICE/verkehrsangelegenheiten/verkehrslenkung/verkehrszeichen/seite8.htm \
 ).

Still one could think that "one could do better" by making the traffic-sign 
look 'less cartoonish' and 'more realistic' (see pic. d.), by adding color or 
even a background (see pic. e.). One could even add some gloss and make the 
red color more appealing. But as you can imagine the whole thing ends up in:

- the traffic-sign (read: icon) is not easily to be recognized anymore - 
especially from a distance (read: in tiny versions, i.e. 16x16 pixels).
- the traffic sign (read: icon) is hard to distinguish from the surroundings.

Of course icons on a computer desktop aren't meant to be just 
traffic/warning-signs. The home-user also expects them to look good. So one 
has to find a trade-off between good usability/recognition and beauty.
For the KDE-icons the compromise has been the current design which shows 
mostly 2D-icons which are shaded in a very 3D-way. For some icons an 
isometric 3D perspective has been chosen (... which is the only way to paint 
16x16/32x32-icons 3-dimensional without alphablending/antialiasing while 
avoinding a jagged look. Also it's easier to be recognized for people who 
have problems with recognizing 3-dimensional objects).

If you look at the Icons for Gnome 2 you'll realize that most of the icons are 
quite similar in this respect: mostly 2D-Objects with lots of shades ... 
(which is not just pure coincidence as TigerT told me on linuxtag 2001 ...)

Apple on the other side recently created an interface (Mac OS X) which was 
mostly targeted at people who think that best things are those which look 
best - therefore they chose photographic icons. 

Although Microsoft has got at least as much money as Apple to spend for their 
artwork they went for a more 'cartoonish' design. Obviously their usability 
research has still shown that photographic icons are not suited best for 
day-to-day work. To make the icons still look a bit more cool they added 
semitransparency and a true perspective to their icons. 

In my opinion for KDE 3.1 we should stay with rather 2D-icons in toolbars- and 
mimetype-icons (those are the icons which people have to recognize most of 
the time). For application-icons we should use a bit more photorealistic 
design including a true perspective.
Also to make them look more modern we might want to use more "gloss" on the 
icons.

Greetings,
Tackat


["trafficsigns.jpg" (image/jpeg)]
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