Icons to be designed

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 04 January 2012 18:52:11 Fania Bremmer wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I collected most of the icons we have so far in Plasma Active and tried
> to analyse and group them a bit,
> see http://share.basyskom.com/contour/UIDesign/Icon_List_PA.jpg for details.
> 
> The icons with an orange shape around are icons we should redesign, or
> at least discuss about...
> 
> This would be my feedback:
> TOP BAR
> - If we want to stick to the first icons of the top bar, these icons
> always should be single color, just white, with grey outline, no shadow.
> That would mean an adaption to:
> - Share Icon (white with outline), maybe also another symbol? Something
> like this:
> http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/49435/128/icon_share_this_icon?
> - Like Icon (white with outline)
> - Connect (white with outline), maybe also another symbol? Like this
> http://www.webhelpdesk.com/images/icon_link-integrate.png?
> - Home (white with outline), reduced details

+1. They definitely need to be redone. I'd suggest they should all be 
recreated from scratch, not just 'white-ified'. I wouldn't suggest anything 
but give freedom to Eugene to come up with his own ideas. I prefer to let 
designers' creativity flow and then decide if what they come up with is 
understandable.

> - Shutdown Icon: here an ongoing discussion about the icon itself needs
> to be solved first

Agreed. Wouldn't make sense to have an icon created and then not used. That 
means we should decide on this soon so it won't delay the icon creation.

> CATEGORIES
> - As with the newest implementation the categories dont have any icons
> anymore, maybe we dont need to redo them. If we need them somewhere else
> I would prefer a change in symbol for Bookmark (looks like "Like") and
> Apps (looks like "Settings")

I'm still hoping we won't need them. Having icons all over the place isn't 
always the best idea anyway.

> - The "Like" Feature should either have always hearts (as an Icon in the
> top bar as also for rating in the context menu), or always have stars

+1. I'd go for stars, since hearts for rating would probably look quite 
cheesy.

> - Bookmark icon: star would be already taken for "like", so another icon
> needed

Hmm... well, is that really so? Isn't "like" basically the way to bookmark a 
page? You can also create a bookmark implicitly by connecting, but "like" is 
imo our browser's version of "bookmark". So i think they might well use the 
same icon.

> - Recently visited: ongoing discussion
> 
> - Lock, Sleep and Hibernate Icons need a rebrush of color and style, as
> we already pointed out for PA2. The symbols are fine, in my opinion,
> maybe only sleep is a bit vague?

I'd also go with just restyling them to fit with the lock screen.

> Another thing is striking here: the different styles in general. Some
> icons do have a drop shadow, some have an outline, some have colors,
> others are just whitish, most of them have buttons underneath, some are
> circles, others are squares. I know that we mostly "borrow" icons from
> somewhere because of the lack of an icon designer with lots of time ;)
> But maybe we find a unique look&feel we want to apply in general and for
> all future icons?

Agreed. I don't think all icons in all places need to have the same style, 
though. On desktop, the notification area icons have a different style than 
other icons and this does not seems strange. We should aim for consistency for 
each kind of icon, though.
I don't think we should/can design every little icon ourselves. Also because 
applications will want to use the pretty large set of Oxygen icons instead of 
having to create everything anew.

> So, this is my first attempt in smoothing out the icon collection in PA
> a bit :)
> Feedback welcome.

Thanks for creating the overview, it's much easier to think and discuss about 
the icons now :)