Re: [Usability]Icons and the HIG draft

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 02:35, John Levon wrote:
> The icons section
> 
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig/icons.html
> 
> states that you should not auto-scale a high-contrast colour icon down to
> 24x24, but that you *are* allowed to auto-scale the low-contrast
> colour version.
> 
> Is this intentional ?

It probably was... the rationale I think is that high contrast icons are
specially drawn to have thick lines and crisp edges, and that scaling
disrupts those features somewhat. Instead, any small high contrast icons
that are required should be hand-drawn at the small size and provided as
alternatives in the icon theme.  

Low contrast icons, on the other hand, are identical to the regular
icons except for the amount of contrast, so scaling them down isn't
likely to impair a user who needs them any more than it affects the
regular icons for users who don't.

Of course, despite all that advice, the current high contrast icons are
only provided at one size and scaled up or down as needed anyway...
nobody's had time to create the different sizes yet.  (Or to produce SVG
themes from them, which would probably be a better idea).

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems