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List:       kde-artists
Subject:    Re: K-ARTIST: KDE HIG, CIG and AG
From:       Torsten Rahn <torsten.rahn () credativ ! de>
Date:       2004-08-25 21:23:42
Message-ID: 200408252323.42894.torsten.rahn () credativ ! de
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> And, yes such guidelines are needed and it would have been a good thing if
> they had existed before some of the recent usability "improvements" were
> implemented and before the Crystal icon theme and Keramik style were
> implemented.  Actually, we have icons guidelines, but some of the Crystal
> icons that have too much detail (e.g. Krita), and therefore have low
> usability in small sizes, were still committed.
>
> The major problem is, are the developers that implemented these serious
> usability mistakes and those that produced the Crystal icons and the
> Keramik style going to be willing to produce guidelines that recognize that
> mistakes were made and that they need to be corrected.

Thank you for your input. While I don't agree with you on several issues  your 
input reminded me that we also need to cover the "usability vs. marketing" 
issue in our guidelines:

"Icon design both affects and is influenced by technology as well as 
usability, beauty, fashion and marketing. This aspect is important for the 
choice of a default icon style and it needs to be carefully evaluated during 
the design process of each particular icon. 
As an example the "KDE 2.x Hicolor Theme" was very good in terms of usability. 
But while KDE is about ease of use it's also about being a modern beautiful 
desktop in the eyes of our users. While the artist team was aware of the fact 
that the Crystal iconset was more or less worse in terms of usability we 
decided to choose it as a replacement as we felt that the advantages in terms 
of PR, beauty and fashion would be much bigger." 


Some further points that probably won't be mentioned in the guidelines but 
still belong here: 

The feedback that we got from our users during the last two years has shown 
that we made the right decision. Still there needs to be a lot of work done 
to improve the usability of a lot of icons with issues that still remain. I'd 
like to add as well that to reach our aim to move to SVG technology the 
Crystal Style was much better suited than the HiColor iconstyle.

Regards,
Torsten Rahn
> --
> JRT
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