Icon Theme

[David Nielsen]

Leo skrev:
> Hi there,
>
> The Tango project has become the one true style guide for free
> software theming. A few heavy weight apps such as gnome, inkscape,
> gimp and openoffice.org are or will be using tango style icons. The
> project's developers are of high profile and the quality of the icons
> is without doubt the best. I followed a few Tango_Fridays¹ in irc
> #tango and was much impressed. As you can see in Tango_Fridays¹, more
> and more upstream apps will be adopting their icons.
>
> Today I visited the EchoDevelopment² after a few months, my feeling
> was not good. But my biggest concerns is that although Echo is using
> tango naming specs, its style (perspective, color palette etc) is
> different. This will put Fedora in a situation as Bluecurve does -
> inconsistency across the desktop. Inconsistency will definitely
> compromise usability.
>
> So what's the way out? Changing Echo to fit into the universe of tango
> style icons? Put Echo on hold and use tango for Fedora 7? Please
> comment.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Footnotes: 
> ¹  http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Fridays
> ²  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/EchoDevelopment?highlight=%28echo%29
>   
I've tried convincing the art team of Tangos superior design, 
consistency, usability, accessibility and progress for a while now, it 
hasn't really brought me any good fortune, infact I think the term used 
was "trolling".  One problem we are sure to encounter though is that 
Tango has wide upstream acceptance, The gimp, Jokosher and many other 
fine existing and upcoming big FLOSS projects uses and relies on Tango. 
As many of these, the biggest two being the GIMP and OpenOffice, aren't 
readily themeable via standard means, it will mean a lot of work for the 
art team to get the same coverage not to mention cooperation with the 
packagers (not an issue after the core/extras merge I wonder?) and if 
they don't manage that it means inconsistency for the users which is all 
together not desirable.

Tango is available from Extras so you can install it, you will however 
not get as positive an experience as you could have since in some ways 
the rest of the Echo theme clashs stylistically with Tango and given 
that it's mighty hard to change the entire artwork set end to end the 
result is less pleasing that it could be desired.

That being said, the correct place to debate such issues is probably the 
fedora-art list.

- David Nielsen