[Tango-artists] oxygen

[Eric Larson]

On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 15:22 -0500, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> On 16 Nov, 2005, at 9:32 AM, Eric Larson wrote:
> > ...
> > On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 11:05 +0100, jimmac at novell.com wrote:
> > ...
> >> A new website for the new KDE icon theme is up at
> >> http://oxygen-icons.org. The good news is that it's in fact closer to
> >> the tango style than the crystal icons (note the inner stroke, yay!),
> >> and that they are doing at least toolbar-sized versions in additionto
> >> the biggies.
> >>
> >> The bad news is they went for the document-sheet for all mimetypes
> >> metaphor.
> >
> > Have we done usability testing on this aspect? I have been playing 
> > with KDE lately (I haven't looked at it in a very long time) and the
> > document-sheet based icons really do not provide a clear visual cue as
> > to what the icon expresses.
> > ...
> 
> On the other hand, it does make a clear distinction between documents 
> and other kinds of files, which is useful if you have a mixture of 
> types on your desktop (for example). Currently Tango's audio-x-generic 
> and video-x-generic document icons look very much like application 
> icons (those of iTunes and iMovie respectively).
> 
> Such a standard is especially useful for games, where documents have no 
> other real-world metaphor to use. What should be the icon for a saved 
> game in game X? In Windows and Mac OS, the answer is easy and 
> predictable: the icon for game X, in the middle of a sheet of paper.
> 

This is a good point. I suppose my reaction is based on the fact that
any type of file is given this document based icon. For example, I had
some images, source code files, rpms and tar.gz files on my desktop. In
GNOME, it is easy to distinguish each type of file simply on the visual
cue of the icon. When I saw my desktop in KDE, this distinction
disappeared and I had to read the file names in order to see what they
files actually were. I realize this is nothing more than anecdotal
evidence, but it was a very stark and noticeable difference. 

With that said, your point about defaulting a random file (such as a
saved game or known "document" type file) to a document based icon makes
a good deal of sense. 

Eric