In Defense of GNOME Icons
Recently I saw a few people commenting along of ‘GNOME 3 icons being crap’ so I investigated what the actual core of the issue might be. When dissing the years of work that went into creating the system theme and pushing app icons upstream, most of the commenters seem to actually have a problem with the folder icon.
The GNOME folder is a result of using the actual beige color that is both the real world folder material, and the legacy of Tuomas’ GNOME 1 folder. Easy things are hard so it’s a result of endless iteration with my soul mate, Lapo Calamandrei, to get the icon look great at the small sizes, but also to have the icon snap to the render grid well for the common high res sizes (64, 96, 128, 256). It repeats well in a grid. I feel the voices disliking the beige folder are the same voices disliking the grey folder in the original Tango set. We ended up listening to those folks and changed it to blue, but I ended up regretting the decision.
The blue folder grabbed way too much attention for something that’s used when browsing for the actual content. While a lot of effort went into making the folder, we don’t actually expose it all too much. Exposing the directory structure is the pre-GNOME 3 world. What we focus on now are the applications.
Which is actually the other issue people seem to attribute to “GNOME sucking”. It is true that the current reality of opening up the overview is quite different to the ideal mockup.
Many apps ship with very sub par application icons. One of the solution to this problem is to “take over” the theming of Application icons. We have been there in the past and just like taking over app distribution by distro packaging, there is a lot to lose when you centralize something that should really be left to the application authors. The app icon is the app’s identity. Sure it’s more difficult to convince the upstream to take your work despite it not being created by an algorithm, but taking away a project’s identity in the name of policing the aesthetics of the overview is not the right approach. We toyed with the idea of forming a blacklist and buttonizing some icons in prior to the 3.0 release, but came to the conclusion we should help app authors with guidelines and design help instead. For the life of me, can’t find this on the wiki anymore.
We’ve been successful in pushing app icons upstream for projects such as Inkscape, GIMP, Blender, Transmission and helped other projects such as Font Forge to create a multi-resolution icon adhering to the Tango guidelines. Another aspect of taking over all app icons by overriding them with an all-encompassing theme seems to be “consistency”. The word is used in a sense that the icons share a common shape and perspective. Now while that makes them form a really nice grid, it goes against the most useful attribute of a good icon — being distinguishable form the rest. I love the challenge of being restricted to a button shape and I’ve certainly drooled over some of the smart icons fitting into a rectangle pill, but a unique silhouette is really helping in identifying the app in the grid.
We do have a wider choice for the perspective in the Tango guidelines. Experience has showed us some objects simply can’t be made immediately distinguishable facing straight, so the on the table perspective is used sometimes. But that doesn’t suddenly make the set inconsistent.
To make myself clear, the icons aren’t perfect. We have a lot of issues to fix, but I felt I needed to express my stance on the repeating comments.
March 11th, 2013 at 4:05 am
No no no you can’t defend this ancient crap. But you CAN generate clicks, I’ll grant you that! To me the sight of these is a broadcast system message: “something gone wrong with the system; reverting to bare defaults until you fix it, user”!
And that’s all they’ll ever “symbolically, visually” represent to me. That something’s wrong and unfinished.
March 11th, 2013 at 4:43 am
Beige? It appears to me more like greenish gray.
March 11th, 2013 at 6:33 am
You can count me as someone who’s not a fan of the myriad of “everything is a square, maybe with round corners,” icon sets. Android has the same ‘unique silhouette’ guideline, but almost every alternate set just makes everything the same shape, possibly just by drawing the shape behind the regular icon. I’d like a set of icons that are fairly flat, for instance, but pretty much everything like that makes every icon either a square or a circle.
A further problem on Android is that a lot of applications just use an icon from iOS, where everything is a rounded square. So you end up with 30% of the icons following one guideline and the rest following the system guideline. It seems that Canonical makes all of their icons as rounded squares (except the software center icon), so the same problem happens on Ubuntu, though to a lesser degree.
I think the only serious complaint I have about the icons on my system are that some of them are clearly scaled up from a significantly lower resolution, which looks bad. But the ones affected aren’t Gnome icons.
March 11th, 2013 at 9:44 am
I think the folder icons are good as they are, the aren’t distracting. I have the feeling that people complaining are people that love to stare at the application grid full of colorfull icons instead of trying to actually do stuff. Keep up the good work.
March 11th, 2013 at 10:04 am
The folder icons are drawn quite nicely, but the color is killing it. It just feels so… antique. Dusty. It feels like nobody touched them for decades. I’m sorry if that’s not the case, but it just gives that impression. I’m glad that GNOME as a project moved from that dull gray colors of past to more lively colors. The folder icons should follow. It’s something that always hits a person into the eyes, after he sees GNOME.
Of course, one must not overdo it. KDE is an example of a project where they went into the other extreme. Their vast number of colors and visual inconsistency (unless you like a “graphical circus”) is very off-putting.
March 11th, 2013 at 10:51 am
IMHO folder icons are quite nice. However emblems of musical note, camera, for “Music”, “Photos”, “Documents” etc. have too little contrast. When I see a grid of these icons, I can’t find e.g. with a glimpse of an eye.
This is especially true, when I’m presented with small versions of these icons.
If emblems on folder icon had a bit more contrast, they would be better I think.
March 11th, 2013 at 10:52 am
I probably have too much bias for anyone to listen to me here, but I like the core idea of emphasizing content. The same reason I like the dull and gray user interface in design software because I am focusing on the design. It’s hard to match colors and styles together if the application toolbox jumps in the way.
Now, not everyone is a designer, and we are talking about the folder icon, but we have a vision and we think it matters in the big picture.
March 11th, 2013 at 11:10 am
Haters gonna hate… :/
I have had my personal problems with GNOME in the past few years (using GNOME 3 since the .0 release) but I still kept using it and I am REALLY happy how it is turning out now.
Icons, however, have never been the problem for me. I always loved the GNOME artwork and appreciate the work you and the other designers are putting into it. I do not like any of the 3rd party themes better, certainly not the Ubuntu theme or any of the icon-on-colored-rectangle ones.
The current theme may not be perfect everywhere but the direction is great! Also, in a default installation, only a handful (at most) of “bad” icons remain. On Fedora, I only really hate the ABRT and SELinux icons (which are not really “GNOME”)
While I personally do not really have a problem with this I tend to agree that gray/white is used quite often in the current icon theme. There is not much we can do about it in many cases (paper is white…). However I have some suggestions for specific icons:
- Rhythmbox: just make it brown or black, white speakers are not very common.
- Boxes: instead of the silverish gray, I think going with a goldish tone would work well.
- Epiphany: the land masses really look frozen, just add a bit more green and brown, just like realy “earth from space” shots (or earlier versions of the icon I think).
- Tweak Tool: could be darker, as control panels normally are.
March 11th, 2013 at 12:33 pm
A possible issue is that the Overview looks much worse with a light background. I am not a fan of the fading effect at the bottom or the small fonts either.
The icons are good (except the folder icons for different places, which IMHO just copy one of Apple’s mistakes), but GNOME Shell is placing them under an unflattering light.
March 11th, 2013 at 12:39 pm
There are some people commenting they don’t like the icons, but I wonder if the “silent majority” shares their opinion. I’m totally satisfied with the icon theme. The folder icons are restrained but elegant, no need to change them in my opinion.
March 11th, 2013 at 12:45 pm
Michael: Thanks for the suggestions. Trying to avoid being too neutral and unnatural where it’s undesired is something I’ll be working on.
March 11th, 2013 at 12:52 pm
The default icons of GNOME are fine, as well as the icons of the well-known other GTK+-Applications. Their are problems, but more with older applications or one that are not strongly tied to GNOME (i.e. IOQuake3 which is to small, Geeqie which is ugly and small). GNOME can help this projects, if they want
What I strongly disagree:
Exposing the directory structure is the pre-GNOME 3 world. What we focus on now are the applications.
That one of the problems of GNOME. People nowadays now what is a file-structure, we don’t need any legacy-metaphors like the “Desktop” (in term of what Win95 defined). With GNOME3 we got rid of the “Desktop”. So we shouldn’t make a step back and fall into this “App-Trap” defined by iOS or (even worse) iTunes, iPhoto and iAnyThing.
I even don’t understand some of the current GNOME developsment:
* Nautilus (generic file-browser)
* EOG (specifi image-viewer)
* documents or photos (what this? purpose?)
In case of a file-browser, the file-structure and the file itself is visible and usable. In EOG we can view the image and everything else, from zooming, fullscreen to rotating.
Photos? Documents? I don’t get the file-structure nor an full-features image-viewer.
The first thing everyone want on his Android/iPhone is a file-browser. Maybe thats the reason why the market is full of these.
March 11th, 2013 at 2:33 pm
The GNOME icon theme is great, the folders’ colour is truly neutral and not disturbing.
However, it lacks of some applications’ icons. And that’s not bad, Jakub, that’s just because icon designers (from third parties apps) don’t follow the same style as the GNOME branding. Having said that, one may end up by having a lot of uncoherent icon styles when opening the Overview; that’s the disturbing thing and the reason why I don’t use the GNOME icon theme and use Faience (which has lots and lots of icons for almost every popular app).
Of course, I’m not demanding you guys to do icons for every app, but it would be good if third-party icon designers did icons that follow the GNOME icon theme.
March 11th, 2013 at 2:39 pm
folders’ color is more greyish than beige. A more beigish color (or chocolate as in the Tango guidelines) should look better.
March 11th, 2013 at 3:23 pm
Nacho: made some tweaks — http://jimmac.musichall.cz/stuff/folders-gnome3.png
March 11th, 2013 at 4:24 pm
The “let’s change everything” attitude in GNOME will certainly extend to random icons like the folder icon. Nobody wants to do a whole new set of icons, and also conjure up guidelines by which they should be used. So we get these one-off changes that a few people believe are a step in the right direction. Without taking the whole design into account it is simply bikeshedding.
Although I really do like the “beiger” folders elsewhere in these comments. But that’s just the nature of bikeshedding.
March 11th, 2013 at 4:45 pm
Jakub, that looks great, doesn’t it?
March 11th, 2013 at 5:04 pm
jimmac: The icons look pretty awesome in that colour, it would be really nice if someone released them in a iconset that inherits from gnome’s default so we can use them right away
I still think that the media emblem things lack contrast… maybe they should be dark grey?
BTW I was also a fan of tango
March 11th, 2013 at 5:04 pm
‘s grey folder
March 11th, 2013 at 9:08 pm
jimmac: the beige alternative is really warmful and welcoming and reminds me of my “paper folders”. Nice work!
March 12th, 2013 at 2:02 am
The icons are perfectly all right. What’s wrong is little pictures on the folders, which don’t look good (imo) and serve no purpose. People who are not familiar with the concept of “home directory” are not going to figure it out based on an icon of a folder with a house on it.
March 12th, 2013 at 9:23 am
I guess there is a conflict between beeing “usable” and “looking good”. Usable means, as you say, easy to distinguish from each other based on shape and color. However, it seems that a lot of people thinks that a good looking icon set is icons that harmonize alot with each other, based on having similar shapes and similar tones. Hence, “looking good” in their mind means not usable.
Is there anything that can be done about it? Well, adjusting some key icons might be one thing, like updating the folder icon to be better looking. In the screenshot above, the clear orange icons kind of stand out taking a little to much attention (xchat, VLC, the star folder and firefox) so maybe make sure that these bright orange is not used unless we want to make the application really stand out (like firefox might be ok, since it is probably a very used application for most people). Also, what is up with the VLC traffic cone icon?!
So, to summarize my view I think the icon set would feel more fresh by minor refresh of key icons and tone down some really attention seeking icons.
March 12th, 2013 at 10:02 am
>> Also, what is up with the VLC traffic cone icon?!
You should ask the VideoLAN guys about that…
March 12th, 2013 at 11:51 pm
Hey,
I never cared much about the icons. They simply do their job without getting in my way. And that’s actually a good thing. You only care about bad things usually.
However, I saw the new coloured version today and have to mention that my eyes hurt when I try to difference between the symbols on it. I think it is a contrast issue but I don’t know a lot about such things. I simply have issues to focus on the symbols on them.
March 14th, 2013 at 4:43 am
YAY folder icons once again!
)
@jimmac: I kinda like your experiment, I’d need to test them throughly, to really judege them, but I think it could work (well, after some tweaking, clearly
@Alfredo: believe me, we try to do the icon for every sinlge app already and we actually have icons for a lot of them, but it’s not that easy to have them accepted by the authors sometimes.
@Ben: since we already conjured up design guidelines years ago the change would automagically take the whole design into consideration, also if Jakub makes such a change the whole design is automagically taken into consideration (being him the author of most of it), do you think a poll would produce better results? If yes, really?
March 14th, 2013 at 7:38 am
It simple. Just change them as you like. I almost always do.
March 15th, 2013 at 6:21 am
`Another aspect of taking over all app icons by overriding them with an all-encompassing theme seems to be â€?consistencyâ€?.’
Letting artistic designers take over what should be usability engineers’ responsibilities is what leads to black stereo cabinets with seventeen identical black buttons. Or buildings whose facade is a wall of glass that’s so consistent you have to push in random spots to determine where the doors are.
The grid of silhouettes shows what’s good and what isn’t—I know instantly what half a dozen of them are; the rest take much more work to decipher. The “smart icons fitting into a rectangle pill” are slick, and nice works of art, but they are much less functional. And a computer is nothing if not a tool.
March 15th, 2013 at 9:18 pm
@Lapo Tweak on, dudie.
March 18th, 2013 at 2:00 am
I love the Tango icon set ( gnome 2.x) but I don’t like what’s is used for Gnome Shell.
I don’t stare at the overview but I use gtk application a lot and honestly the default theme is cold, giving a sad finish to the overall.
I’m using the Faenza iconset with Gnome Shell’s Adwaita theme and it’s a perfect mix.
Or maybe I just prefer to have warmer colors.
March 20th, 2013 at 5:36 pm
I like how we mere mortals see perfect icons in jimmac’s experiment and lapo clearly sees them needing some tweaking.