[Tango-artists] whither addressbook?

[Rodney Dawes]

We don't care about what icons are most popular. Icons aren't popular on
a per-icon level. They're popular on a whole theme level. And we don't
particularly care if other themes don't follow the Tango Style. The
point of themes, is that the themes have their own style. We want to
push for applications to use the Tango style by default (and we are
doing that successfully, at least for GNOME, and ISVs).

If we just ask people what icons they want to see in the UI, they will
say "all of them". But the more icons we provide, the more potential is
that more of them will lose their meaning. And the Icon Naming
Specification is meant to only be a Base set of icons to start with.
We intend to write addendum icon naming guides for deprecated icons,
and for icons specific to different genres of applications.

For instance, we also have the tango-icon-theme-extras package, which
provides all the curreent various iPod icons, as well as a Dell DJ icon.
Several of the artists are also working on drawing icons for the Art
Libre set, which is meant for graphics applications. Scribus is already
using a number of these icons in upstream CVS, and GIMP is not far
behind either. They're already using a tango-ified app icon, and as soon
as an entire set of icons for GIMP are finished, all of the icons for
the tools/palettes/etc..  in GIMP should be Tango style as well. Several
applications in GNOME are already using Tango style icons for their app
icons as well, such as Sound Juicer and Dasher. We are even working on
updating the style in the GNOME Icon Theme, to follow the Tango Style
Guidelines. It's an amazingly nice jump forward for it, and I can't wait
until we get it finished and everyone is happily using it.

-- dobey


On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 10:46 +0200, SHADOW-XIII wrote:
> I just want to add my 2p to the discussion.
> I understand that you try to stick with standard names and leave more 
> icons to be created for certain applications, but there are some more 
> disadvantages of that:
> 
> - one, the most important is that, probably only standard-official tango 
> icons theme will be good enough, all other icons from non-tango pack 
> will be poorer quality and may not stick to the general tango icon look
> This will break whole Tango idea ..
> 
> Wouldn't it be better to start an icon replacement work ?
> Where everybody could ask about an icon for an app or other thing ?
> I see it that way:
> - you put submit form on tango-project where people can add icon requests
> - and you add voting to the list
> - from the list you will see what icons people would like to see
> This way you do not have to make ALL icons, but only those most popular 
> .. since all standard tango icons will be made you can move to the next 
> level, which is that requesting form ...
> 
> personally I got no graphic skills at all, only have some skills with 
> mixing already created graphics, but certainly I do not want Tango to 
> stay only with standard icons