Icon Theme Spec + High Contrast Icons

[Calum Benson]

(Snipping Suzanna, who no longer works at Sun, and adding Bill who I  
don't think is on the XDG list.)

On 26 Nov 2005, at 14:42, Thomas Wood wrote:

>    High contrast icons should be designed such that they are  
> visible on a black backgrounds, as well as white. The icons should  
> also designed such that they can be easily inverted to create a  
> High Contrast Invert themes. I am also CC'ing the maintainers of  
> the GNOME High Contrast theme to get their comments on how to go  
> about creating good high contrast icons.

The HIG already includes design guidelines for high contrast icons:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig_new/icons- 
design-accessible.html

Some other thoughts:

- There's also the question of low contrast icons, but I think it was  
previously suggested that they'd be better rendered on the fly (by  
adjusting the colour values of the 'regular') by a low contrast theme  
engine.  Does this still sound plausible/sensible to everyone?

- The high and low contrast icon themes still have separate large  
print versions, but since they're identical to the regular versions,  
they're now hidden in the UI (rather than not installed at all,  
because of potential upgrade problems described in http:// 
bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168977).  Should we mention that  
the large print versions of the high and low contrast icon themes are  
deprecated?  (Or does anyone have any thoughts on how we can  
gracefully get rid of them altogether?)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            Java Desktop System Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems