GNOME 3 introduced a new style of icons we call symbolic. Last year, Meg Ford joined the effort we kicked off with Lapo and did a great job extending the theme coverage, without us having any style guidelines in place yet. This year, we’ll have another Woman Outreach program participant joining the effort, so I’ve edited a little video introduction on how we design these icons along with a little overview of all the icon styles currently in place.
Allan has done a great job giving an overview of what we’ve been focusing on recently among the design team. This still leaves some room for me to give a peek on some of the details of what’s coming.
One of the decisions we made for GNOME 3 in terms of identity, was embracing Dave Crossland’s Cantarell and its open source pedigree and making the typeface our own. So far I have only been humbly shaping minor aspects of the typeface, but a long standing issue has been left long untouched, support for Cyrillic. Typeface design is certainly going outside my comfort zone. Luckily most of the glyphs can be dealt with by borrowing from their latin counterparts. The major part of the work involved (and will involve) some shape tweaks, metrics and hinting. Again, the bold weight poses bigger challenges at small sizes, which is our main focus.
Substituted cyrillic glyphs were all sorts of broken.
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As you can see, there’s still some tweaking left to do on the shapes and hints before rolling out 0.0.9, but those not intimidated by jhbuild, please give it a go so you can help me identify issues that aren’t apprent to me. Another set Cantarell needs to support is Greek, as it’s stylistictically required to keep close to the Latin set.
If you’re looking into creating high fidelity mockups of your GNOME application, you might find this widget asset library handy.
In the next installment of teh Blender for Motion Design series, we look at constraints and shape keys. Download the project file if you want to continue with the dissection yourself.
Took a while to bring you another part. Enjoy.
In this episode I’ll demo how to clip objects using another with Blender’s amazing modifiers. As a bonus you get to see the terrible working conditions I sometimes have to endure 
You can grab the project file from the gnome design repository (you might need to clone the whole repo to get the textures).
Someone asked me the other day if I plan to resume work on my pet project, Gorilla. I thought it’s worth replying in public.
Continuing to embrace the unique Gorilla style I would be undoing hundreds of hours of work we invested in the Tango project. I am happy to see people willingly or inadvertently staying within the boundaries set by the guidelines. There is nothing worse than getting a fan mail from someone who has assembled a “theme” composed of all the clashing styles you have created.
Gorilla, you’re my (the?) first SVG icon set, you are my darling. But the world is better without you. Rest in peace.
Set up your screen for animation, learn how to export portions of static mockups, learn keyframing, dope sheet and graph editor. Grab the finished scene here.
Understand materials & textures, learn how to quickly load them up as mesh planes. An example project file available for download here.