Giving up our applications' identity? (was: Re: KDE)

[person-maintainer]

On Thursday 27 December 2007, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> SVN commit 753390 by jpetso:
>
> Icon renaming (code changes - KDE/):
> kmail -> internet-mail

Please excuse my ignorance, but are we now completely giving up our 
identity by using totally generic icons for all of our apps? Should 
KMail, Thunderbird, Mailody, etc., all be represented by the same icon 
internet-mail? Do you really believe Thunderbird will ever replace 
their icon by internet-mail?

Using standardized icons is okay for actions, etc. OTOH, application 
icons are part of the identity of an application and make it easy to 
differentiate an application from other similar applications. Using 
generic application icons does only make sense if there's only one such 
application installed on a system.

I hereby formally object against using such a generic icon for KMail. 
Note, that I have no objections against the actual icon although I 
would have really preferred a variation of the orange E icon (TM) which 
has become a trademark for KMail over the years, but I'm absolutely not 
d'accord with using an icon with a generic name such as internet-mail 
as application icon for KMail. Hmm, thinking about it some more I do in 
fact also object against the usage of the actual icon internet-mail.png 
for KMail because it is totally generic (an envelope with a pen; not 
exactly what I'd call imaginative; more like obvious and totally 
boring) and as such will never become a (new) trademark for KMail.


Regards,

person-maintainer
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