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List:       kde-artists
Subject:    Re: K-ARTIST: Rule based enhancement of small icons
From:       Casey Allen Shobe <cshobe () softhome ! net>
Date:       2004-01-23 14:43:05
Message-ID: 200401230943.05970.cshobe () softhome ! net
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Kenneth Wimer (Thursday 22 January 2004 17:52)
> Hi,
>
> You have a good point with including a black outline around
> the icons, although at small sizes it only reduces quality.

I strongly disagree.  16-1 and 16-2 look nearly identical to me, both pretty 
good.  16-0 looks like crap.

> GNOME has an 
> icon style-guide that inlcudes a black outline (and a shadow, if I
> remember correctly) and if you look at the "outline" icons (attached)
> you will see the result. It does look quite GNOME-ish

Those black outlines are too thick.  There is no need to have *that* thick of 
an outline on that size if icons.  When I was designing toolbar icons for KDE 
2.0, there was a requirement for black outlines, and it was a good thing.

Who really cares if an icon looks "GNOME-ish" if it's actually *usable*.  I 
have a hard time making out the 16-0 icon.  The other two are much more 
clear.  I really hate GNOME vs. KDE discussions, because it really doesn't 
matter what GNOME does - we should try to make KDE as good as possible 
without regard to GNOME (and I think most people do).

> Using a black outline requires one to Keep It Very Simple Stupid
> because of the effect it creates. I definitely suggest removing the
> outline when rendering at small sizes, it only makes things worse.

Do you have any reasoning to justify this argument?  What is your screen DPI 
(check in kinfocenter)?  Maybe that fuzzy unclear icon looks better on an 
800x600 resolution on a 17" screen, but it looks like arse at a higher DPI 
(mine is 133).

Also, you never know what the background will be.  It may be a grey toolbar 
background, or maybe the user likes dark blue.  Maybe they appear on a 
transparent area, such as kicker, and the background could be a jpeg image of 
any color.

The black border makes the icon usable on any of these backgrounds without 
risk of blurring in - even on a solid black background, black-bordered icons 
look okay.

I took an interesting approach when making an icon for a Kopete plugin 
recently - I used no outline, but only black to create the design (in this 
case, the design of the Vegvisir rune), and a background of varying 
translucency (this background color is overridden by Kopete per-account, so 
it may be red, or yellow, or orange...whatever, and the backdrop makes the 
outline visable regardless of background color.  But this is just weird :).

I have to wonder though about the effectiveness of a black rule for icons such 
as these, because it became a great blur when resizing down to 16x16 from 
128x128 (you can see that the 32x32 icon is rather blurry - I didn't clean it 
up).

James?

http://osss.net/~sigthor/code/bjirc/icons/cr16-app-bjirc_protocol.png
http://osss.net/~sigthor/code/bjirc/icons/cr32-app-bjirc_protocol.png
http://osss.net/~sigthor/code/bjirc/icons/cr128-app-bjirc_protocol.png

Vertu sæll,

-- 
Sigþór Björn Jarðarson (Casey Allen Shobe)
http://rivyn.livejournal.com
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