Calligra (Sheets) program icon inconsistencies

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 9 May 2012 20:22, Cyrille Berger Skott <cberger at cberger.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday 09 May 2012, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
>> On 9 May 2012 16:46, Cyrille Berger Skott <cberger at cberger.net> wrote:
>> > On Wednesday 09 May 2012, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
>> >> > ? As I understood from boemann's and Cyrille's replies there indeed is
>> >> > work done to get an updated set of icons for all programs, at least
>> >> > the forked/moved ones.
>> >>
>> >> - For forked ones - (this is only KWord->Words?) - maybe. But please
>> >> some confirm this is part of the agreement (if not I recommend doing
>> >> nothing and just wait for koffice counterparts fade away completely)
>> >>
>> >> - For moved ones - fixed versions exist as stated above.
>> >
>> > There was many objections to the use of the old icons, which has led
>> > Boemann to look for someone who would work on a new set of icons for all
>> > applications (http://blogs.kde.org/node/4569). And as far as I know,
>> > Kubuntiac was working on that.
>>
>> Starting with blog instead of discussing?
> There was this discussion: http://lists.kde.org/?l=calligra-
> devel&m=132532245430827&w=2 (I suspect like some other discussions it had a
> follow up on IRC... with the actual decision).

Well

This thread did not end with decission that we need something. There
was no plan to look for decission or go for a meeting since the
initial post from you was based on wrong assumption. There were app
icons [1], and for 8 apps (not counting kformula and kchart anymore),
not just for Karbon, Kexi and Krita as you wrote there. Now all these
are without the (K) so what is the reason for bikeshedding? They were
accepted back then in 2009 by this very team so why are they suddenly
not OK?

[1] http://pinheiro-kde.blogspot.com/2009/03/koffice-icons-2-highdef-ones.html

I suspect that two things are here confused. Possible issue was
mentioned in the thread that the icons are similar but the real
problem is that the small (16, 22) icons should be more intensively
reworked for better contrast, and better simplification. The Oxygen
guys properly do that for many icons but it happened to us that
Calligra icons are not recognizable in small sizes. The large icons
are more acceptable. We have not seen improvements proposals from
potential artists - what is surprising since the usual workflow
between them and customer (that's us) involves iterations of the work.
That's my opinion before I see any counter-proposals that are
massively and amazingly better in terms of consistency, recognition
and scale-down well.

Also completely separate and technical issue is IMHO that we have a
kind of conflict with app recognition in the KDE/GNOME app icon
system: we _even_ encourage vendors to modify our app icons. Even
more, this enabling icon replacements suggests, that we have nothing
against using of the same icon for apps from different office suites,
e.g.  OO Writer and Calligra Words could share the same icon. And
vendors would do that, thus breaking recognition.

All that was IMHO always against most basic rules of marketing. Now as
we do not maintain the fallback to hicolor in any way, the result is
simply that for more than 6 months since the initial thread we have no
icons for the apps in non-Oxygen systems. It's only a side note but
per my opinion: the fallback system for app icons is thus broken by
design, so also I am not surprised that closed-source apps on Linux
(even if exist) look like alien. It cannot look always right unless we
have icon for such app supported in all popular themes.

So eventually, let's decide if icon is a kind of placeholder for us or
a tool for recognition (as this is the case on all current OSes,
including mobile ones).

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
 Kexi & Calligra (kexi-project.org, identi.ca/kexi, calligra-suite.org)
 KDE Software Development Platform on MS Windows (windows.kde.org)