Re: Gnome Icon Pixmap Guidelines -- Request for Amendments

[John Kodis <kodis jagunet com>]

On Wed, Sep 29, 1999 at 03:50:44PM +0200, Matthias Warkus wrote:

> Gnome Icon Pixmap Guidelines
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> FIRST VERY ROUGH DRAFT -- mawa, September 29th, 1999
> 
> Gnome icons
> 
> - are 48x48 pixels in size, PNG format
> 
> - are easy to recognise when scaled down to 20x20 pixels

I think that these two requirements tend to clash with one another.
Far better than scaling a large icon down to get a small icon would be
to draw two icons, each optimized (or whatever the proper graphics
arts term would be) for their final size.  The KDE folks have a
full set of 16x16 pixel mini-icons for use in menu lists (in
/usr/[local]/share/icons/mini), and IMHO, the KDE menu entries are
much sharper looking and easier to distinguish from each other than
are the Gnome icons.

Sorry for proposing doubling the workload for our already overloaded
artists, but I don't think that we can get really great looking small
icons by simply scaling down large icons.

BTW, what sizes will be used in various circumstances?  You've called
out 48x48 and 20x20, but the menu list icons seem more like 16x16, and
this seems to be the size that KDE has settled on for their small
icons.

-- John Kodis.