Re: Fanza Icon Set

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi Nick,

This probably isn't the best list for this discussion though, to be
fair, I don't know which one would be...

Nick wrote:
> I haven't seen any mention of a new icon set for Gnome 3 (forgive me if
> I'm mistaken) but could I bring attention to the Faenza Icon set[1]? Is
> there an opportunity here to engage people outside of the Gnome/Tango
> sphere and get some nice, seemingly well liked, icons included with the
> new theme and the new gnome shell?

I'm not an expert on such matters, but I'll tell you what I know. First,
though GNOME's choice of icon theme has not changed for 3.0, that theme
has undergone some fairly significant changes of late. There have been
some major stylistic innovations over the past couple of releases, and
the icon set has also received spiffy high-res versions of its icons
(examples: [1], [2]). Another new development for this release is the
addition of symbolic icons [3].

Faenza is a nice icon set, and I know that several of the GNOME design
crew really like it. At the same time, GNOME's icon theme integrates
with the desktop in a number of ways which mean that it's unlikely that
we'd want to switch. These include:

 * Colour palette - matches our GTK themes (both Clearlooks and
Adwaita), etc.

 * Programmatic integration of symbolic icons - they can be scaled and
coloured (which, among other things, is good for a11y)

 * High res is needed for GNOME Shell

I'm sure I will have got some of this wrong, but I think that's roughly
where we are.

Please feel free to continue this discussion with me off-list, or drop
by #gnome-design to have a more open discussion.

Best wishes,

Allan

[1]
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-icon-theme/plain/gnome/256x256/devices/drive-harddisk.png?h=one-canvas

[2]
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-icon-theme/plain/gnome/256x256/apps/accessories-calculator.png?h=one-canvas

[3] See:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/SymbolicIcons