[RFC] Future goals, new colour palette and perspective clarification, etc.
by Martin Sourada
Hi all,
it's been a while since we have done anything... Given that I'm currently the
only one who's currently doing anything on Echo icons (if anyone else is doing
something, please speak up!), I thought it's undesirable to keep developing
two concurrent icon themes. I'd like to obsolete the former Echo Icon Theme
with Echo Perspective. I've done the most necessary changes on wiki already
and closed old tickets mostly with WontFix resolution. My goal is to keep
depending in Echo Perspective on Echo Icon Theme until until we've covered
what's missing and then fully obsolete Echo Icon Theme by it. Probably the
last update to Echo Icon Theme will be adding symlinks to cover xdg folders.
It's strange when there's a combination of yellowbrown echo folders with grey
gnome folders...
I would also like to shift our focus from Gnome Desktop Environment to Xfce
as our primary target because Gnome is having too different goals from us
(we're going for modern, detailed and vibrant colours, while gnome goes
mostly B&W with symbolic icons...). Of course I'll be myself creating
primarily icons to cover apps I use ;-)
I also intend to re-factor the guidelines once again to reflect our changed
goals and to do some clarifications and updates.
What I'm thinking about so far:
-------------------------------
1. Remove guidelines that do not apply to Echo Perspective. This would cover
only the Projections guidelines section.
2. New expanded and normalized colour palette. It's directly based on both
old icons (including the original ones from Diana!) and our current colour
palette, but has more shades of various colours and is "normalized" WRT
CIE Lab colour space (the shades are equidistant in Hue and Chroma, and
then clamped [by keeping Hue and Luma and decreasing Chroma] to sRGB,
between darkest and lightest shade in Lab). This means the new palette is
properly colour managed (absolute rendering intent) and is saved in sRGB
colour space.
If you'd like to play yourself with these things I recommend CIE Color
Calculator by Bruce Lindbloom (and the whole site for more theoretical
info on colour spaces). [1] I also attach the new palette in SVG and Gimp
palette formats (GPL).
In addition to this, two sets of colours are adjacent to each other and
can be used together as if they were one -- dark brown and light brown;
red and orange (actually this is red through orange to yellow) -- this one
is a little departure from original plain-red shades in the current
guideline. It wasn't actually used in the original icons, though.
3. More descriptive guidelines for projections. As creating icons with
perspective is harder to get consistent than with isometric or
whatever-metric projections I suggest adding a guideline on how to create
near-flat icons (arrows, dialogue icons, ...). While creating a rather big
set of icons myself I discovered that this can be easily achieved by
duplicating canvas size and icon front face and scaling+moving them as
one. The duplicated and edited front face becomes naturally a back face
and then we just proceed to pixel-snap it and to connect those two together
to create 3D a object. If the canvas is scaled and moved with the same
factors, than all the icons have the same perspective and share the same
thickness, which is what we want. In the attached PNG image this is
illustrated (only the duplication+resize and move, no pixel snapping,
gradient edit or 3D-ing). The values are:
canvas W×H new W×H move X×Y
-----------------------------------------
256×256 246×246 (+5)×(+12)
128×128 124×124 (+2)×(+6)
64×64 62×62 (+1)×(+3)
48×48 46.4×46.4 (+0.8)×(+2.3)
32×32 31×31 (+0.5)×(+1.6)
4. Include more sizes. We'd support creating 16×16, 22×22 (24×24), 32×32,
48×48, 64×64, 128×128 and 256×256. The attached PNG from point 3. is
showing these. It's some added effort, but looks like at least some of
these is becoming more common. We'd require 16×16 to 48×48 and *at least*
one of the bigger ones with the requirement that if not all are created,
than the smallest should look clear at 64×64 as well, i.e would be pixel
snapped to 64×64 canvas. This is easy to do in inkscape. Alternatively we
could require 64×64 instead of "one of the bigger ones", but the former
has the advantage that we can focus on the most used size if we know it.
I'm pondering whether to allow arbitrary sizes -- e.g. when you know your
icon is often used at some other size. I'd say the best would be to
discourage (by not offering one-canvas template with different sizes than
the above mentioned) but allow on case by case basis provided good reason
is given.
5. One canvas -- allow creating more icons on one canvas. I think it is very
good for icon groups (similar icons, usually used together). My idea is
that each icon would have its own layer called artwork-<icon-name>, then a
yet-to-be-written script would separate these (when building the theme) and
then proceed to generate PNGs as usual. One of the great advantages is
that you can share most of the work in one SVG (reuse gradients, shapes,
etc.), you'd just have to avoid cloning in-between the layers to keep it
working. A WIP using this method is available [2].
6. Change inner outline (guideline) to have rounded edges (as if it were a
thick line with round join and round ends). IMHO it looks better and newer
icons were already using that. Suggested thickness is:
16×16 to 32×32 1 px, 48×48 and 64×64 2 px, the rest is scaled 64×64.
Please read through these changes and offer your comments, I'll start
implementing them in the meanwhile. If there's enough opposition and I'll
have already done some change, I can always revert it back ;-)
Thanks,
Martin
References:
[1] http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?ColorCalculator.html
[2] http://mso.fedorapeople.org/echo-perspective/new/
11 years, 2 months