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List:       kde-artists
Subject:    Re: K-ARTIST:About good icons
From:       "everaldo" <everaldo () conectiva ! com ! br>
Date:       2002-01-28 13:14:39
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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 <tackat@kde.org>
To: <kde-artists@kde.org>
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







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