I agree with its opinion I would like to participate in the development of the official icons of the kde 3 ----- Original Message ----- From: Torsten Rahn To: Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2002 1:11 PM Subject: K-ARTIST:About good icons 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/verkehrslenku ng/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 _______________________________________________ kde-artists mailing list kde-artists@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-artists