Re: [Geary] Symbolic Icon

[Stephen Michel <stephen michel tufts edu>]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 11:34 PM, Michael Gratton <mike vee net> wrote:

Hi Stephen, On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 12:00 AM, Stephen Michel <stephen michel tufts edu> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 4:10 PM, Stephen Michel <stephen michel tufts edu> wrote:

[1]: a png and the svg source: http://stephenmichel.me/geary/

I agree with Mike that it is important to retain the feel of the color icon. I also think that is is a good thing to use the entire space available for a symbolic icon. However, I think Federico's point is more important than either: the most important job of the symbolic icon is to communicate the meaning quickly.

Yep, I don't disagree with you.

In order to do that, the icon must be simple enough to recognize at a glance, and we get that through emphasizing the key features. Over the past few weeks I've used several versions. The easiest to recognize was the one directly under the color icon. I've gone ahead and made a second version of the icon which is a blend of that one and the icon in the upper right corner. It's at the same url, quoted above.

I've been using this version for the last few days and am pretty happy with how it keeps the visual identity of the full-colour icon reasonably intact - even as a large app icon under the HighContrast theme in the Shell's Activities pane, and the reduction of clutter is better than the one currently used in 0.11.

I should clarify that the envelope is the same size in all of the iterations, including this one, because I didn't want to touch the dimensions/ratio. There's a bit of room to play around with this version of the icon, and I do think it would be beneficial to shrink the bottom line a little and make the envelope have a slightly larger height. I'll see if I can find time to do that cleanly later this week. I'll also experiment with wider lines on the envelope.

Cool, I look forward to seeing it!

I went back to take a look at this, and I'm inclined just to go with the latest revision from when I was playing with it over the summer:

- I'm an amateur inkscape user without that much time on my hands. In order to make changes without losing quality, I'd have to spend more time than I'm really willing to, right now.

- This is the symbolic icon, not the main color icon everyone sees in the software center. It's a *tiny* part of the user experience. How much effort is it really worth?

- As we noted in the quoted bits above, it looks pretty good already. I'd rather ship that now, than ship nothing while waiting (perhaps indefinitely) for the perfect icon.

Note that the links earlier in the thread are all broken now. You can find the files referenced at http://smichel.me/files/geary/

Cheers,

Stephen