Suede as default gnome icon theme for Hoary

[Mike Hearn]

On Thu, 2005-02-03 at 01:17 +1000, Andy Fitzsimon wrote:
> With my icon theme designer hat on ;-)
> 
> Etiquette works well with the default gnome theme ( it uses the same
> palette & follows the HIG rules of no text , no puns etc )    it is an
> attempt at something more modern.

Wow, the icons you attached are beautiful. They look vaguely GNOMEish,
however if you put some GNOME icons next to it, do they look OK? I
suspect it looks odd and out of place.

> That said .. Etiquette IS the development theme for human ( as far as
> i know ) and the only change needed once Etiquette is complete is a
> simple palette modification with svgutils to the ubuntu palette.

:From what I understand of art (not much), the palette affects
consistency a great deal, eg icons that use the GNOME palette will fit
in much better than ones that don't, even if they use slightly different
visual styles.

Is Ubuntu really going to use its own palette? At first glance both
GNOME and Ubuntu artwork seems to be based around browns and greys.

> Hopefully one day a branding expert will clear this all up .   Until
> then,  attached is a sample of ubuntu-etiquette icons

I don't think we have any branding experts working on Linux. If there
are any, they probably work for distribution companies like Red Hat and
Canonical, and are therefore concerned with branding their companies
product not Linux/the free desktop as a whole. 

We basically keep ducking this issue because it's easier to make things
configurable than settle on a single visual style like Microsoft and
Apple have done.

But if we carry on like this I'm worried peoples desktops will end up
messy and inconsistent (arguably they already are). A common palette
between GNOME and Ubuntu if nothing else would stop things fragmenting
still further. Right now if you want to fit in with the most popular
distros you need:

- BlueCurve style icons
- GNOME/tigert/jimmac style icons
- ?? Ubuntu/Etiquette style?
- Everaldo/KDE style

What actually happens is that people knock together icons from wherever,
which tend not to fit in with *any* visual style. See the new VMware,
Firefox, Crossover, OpenOffice 2.x etc. It doesn't help that there's
nowhere to go if you want to get icons drawn, you just have to ask
nicely and hope the various artists will do something for you. By
contrast MacOS X and Windows developers can go to iconfactory, and there
is in depth documentation on how to draw icons that fit in.

I don't know what the solution might be though. I think it's just a side
effect of every distro (and indeed open source project) wanting to make
its own brand as strong as possible. 

Your average Linux desktop is a branding disaster zone. The about boxes
talk about GNOME, the login screen and bootup piccies say "Fedora" or
"Ubuntu" but Linux is only mentioned by the person who installed it for
you and even if it was mentioned consistently some people call it
GNU/Linux which sounds different but in most contexts isn't, except when
it is. Etc etc :) 

Oh well, we have much bigger problems than branding anyway ... you go
right ahead, I look forward to putting Etiquette on my desktop soon :)

thanks -mike