Icon Bling
Allan’s new rule says that if you don’t blog about it, it didn’t happen. Thus here’s me telling you about the recent icon design sprint for GNOME 3.0. There’s not much to say, I’ll be honest. This post is about pretty pictures.
GNOME shell exposes application icons in higher resolution than usual, so the fearless Italian led the icon design faction of the design team to fix up the most visible app launcher icons to include the ridiculous size of 256x256px. We also investigated possible workarounds for applications shipping horrid icons, but in the end it’s more important an application is recognizable more than it is pretty, so we backed up from all of those ideas.
All this work is of course on top of the base themes, which are also in a better shape than ever. Big shouts to Lapo, Andreas and everyone involved!
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Awesome work!
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Truly Amazing!! Wow.
I wonder if Glade got a nice Icon? At my last smoke testing of GNOME3 glade didnt have an icon at all
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Very cool!
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Looking Good! Loving Gnome 3 a lot.
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:51 pm
That doesn’t look like Tango anymore… Did I miss something? Are there new icon design guidelines for Gnome 3?
Not that I mind – the icons look great!
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:52 pm
those icons are wonderful !
nice job ! keep it going like that !
March 23rd, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Okahamp: Oh, maybe I didn’t open a bug about that one yet. I have on my hard drive since a while back. Thanks for the reminder!
March 23rd, 2011 at 3:31 pm
Fabulous work, congratulations to everyone involved!!!
One question: Is there already a new icon for Evince? This seems to be the last ugly one in the GNOME default set (at least on my system
) and I couldn’t find a bug entry about it.
March 23rd, 2011 at 3:32 pm
It looks great !!!!
March 23rd, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Looking great.
I presume these are svg’s? If so, does the shell draw them direct from svg? Might be neat if the icons dynamically resized based on monitor resolution.
March 23rd, 2011 at 3:55 pm
Sheesh those HUGE icons in the shell look awfull, the icons themselves may be pretty but theyre way to big (stupid solution for the cut names)
Is this icon size going to be default? This would be a real eyesore if so
March 23rd, 2011 at 3:56 pm
Full of awesomeness, thanks for the Totem icon by the way!
March 23rd, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Thanks for all the kind words, guys.
@Leif: There is a number of reasons why we go for bitmaps for now, but yes, all of these are done as vectors.
@oliver: you did miss an update to the Tango guidelines adding the X-Large size.
Evince and Glade icons are in progress.
March 23rd, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Great work!
March 23rd, 2011 at 4:11 pm
*drools*
March 23rd, 2011 at 4:20 pm
Great work guys
congrats you guys rock, we rock 
!
March 23rd, 2011 at 4:43 pm
There are two aspects of this new launcher that bug me a bit though:
1. The fact that the app icons are larger in the launcher than in the side task bar. Creates some sort of strange disconnection between then. Is that intentional?
2. The use of huge icons with tiny app names seems to assume that icons are generally good enough at communicating the purpose of the apps, which is definitely not the case. For famous apps like Firefox, the icon is probably enough. But for all the other apps, the app names are probably what people want to see primarily as they are much easier to grasp than the icons.
March 23rd, 2011 at 5:22 pm
@lucas: The size of the icons on the dash changes depending on the number of items. We scale because it’s better to progressively discourage to have too many favourites in there, rather than providing a mean to hide/scroll. I don’t think the size disconnect is a more important issue to address.
As for the other point — maybe the label is a size too small, but one of the reasons* to increase the size of the launcher was to avoid ellipsizing the commonly long app names.
* Certainly not the most important one. Primarily it was done to avoid showing more items than it’s humanly possible to scan at one time.
March 23rd, 2011 at 6:28 pm
I don’t like it, fells a little bit cluttered.
March 23rd, 2011 at 6:34 pm
I meant the applications overview.
March 23rd, 2011 at 7:13 pm
That top screenshot (http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-design/plain/mockups/static/overview-application-picker.png) highlights one of the main things that makes gnome-shell look rather unprofessional, to me — there’s such a mish mash of different icon sizes, font sizes, font weights and font colours all on the screen at the same time, it looks like an amateur newsletter produced in the early days of DTP.
In particular, the big size discrepancy between the large icons in the Applications list and the tiny label underneath each one (in what is a badly-hinted font, on my laptop at least) looks particularly bad.
March 23rd, 2011 at 8:41 pm
These are gorgeous! Keep kickin’ booty!
March 23rd, 2011 at 9:24 pm
I agree that it looks cluttered. Maybe shrink the icons in the applications overview area a bit and increase the inter-item padding?
March 23rd, 2011 at 10:11 pm
Very pretty.
An observation: the very large icons in overlay simply overwhelm the favorites sidebar (my sidebar has the default number of 4, though I’m clueless as to what the fourth one is since the icon isn’t familiar[it's a blue book with a red bookmark inside and extending out the bottom], it won’t start, and on mouseover it won’t display any info [bad design decision IMHO]). The favorites simply get lost in the icon “jumble” to my eye. Additionally, I am running running this on a netbook (1024×600) so in the overlay I only get a 4×3 grid which means I have a scroll too much to find my icon (yes, I can search for it but it should be easily accessible with just the mouse [G-S is very mouse-driven, obviously -- which isn't a criticism, BTW] and the search simply takes too long [it's also not using a great heuristic, currently, but I realise both things should get ironed out, but the up/down keypad rather than up/down/left/right is awkward and inefficient if many results are returned]).
The icons themselves are quite nice looking, however, so excellent job to all involved.
Best/Liam
March 23rd, 2011 at 11:13 pm
Tango HB pencil, dmesg log, code on the inside of CD: great examples of rigorous attention to details
Insanely great work, please continue!
March 24th, 2011 at 5:52 am
Nicely done; your work is very inspiring.
March 24th, 2011 at 2:50 pm
Maybe removing the labels and show them on hovering, or keeping them and making them bigger on hovering would be a nice solution to the elipsizing problem ?
March 24th, 2011 at 4:29 pm
@Oleg here, have a cookie
March 28th, 2011 at 2:30 pm
Nice work! I saw the Shotwell icons landing in Fedora 15′s latest build; nice increased resolution but somehow I prefer the original icons’ colors.
March 29th, 2011 at 11:27 pm
nice work, hope brand new folder icons will come.
imho, favorites sidebar and workspace sidebar should go on the desktop. or at least to give an option for geeks for it..
hey, ever tryed adwaita theme on a netbook?
greets
April 2nd, 2011 at 10:45 pm
Yo! man you forgot at Evolution Mail. Current icon is very old, low on details. Please redesing it for final release
May 11th, 2011 at 10:16 pm
This might be a dumb question on my part, but where can I get the updated set?
June 2nd, 2011 at 4:43 pm
I wonder if you could post something about how to create that movie wheel icon.
Thanks in advance
August 26th, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Gnome3 Rocks ! I am using fedora 15 gnome 3 and must say its amazing.. These icons are simply lovely.. ! Don’t know what happen to ubuntu team.. they totally screwed it up with unity !
Nice set of icons,btw