OSD symbols

[Jakub Steiner]

Hi folks!

Over the past few years I sensed a need for a less 'noisy' and
colorful style for graphical representation of certain actions and
status. Blown up icons for on screen display when you increase
brightness, attach a display, event notifications in the system tray,
that sort of thing. Additionally GNOME has dropped using icons in
menus as the huge number of colorful icons ended up creating visual
noise rather than helping to aid the eye spatially. I feel like we've
spilled the baby along with the bathtub there though. And working on
the Moblin icon theme I've really grown to like its simplistic style,
especially next to menu items --
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24178/menu-icons.png

We should start a discussion on how to extend the existing
icon-related specs to allow the introduction of such simple symbols.
There's been some talks about this in the Ubuntu camp, but I think it
makes sense to move this upstream as all distributions face similar
issues. I also believe a simple stencil style would work across
desktop environments so it would be ideal to discuss here.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24178/osd/existing.png vs
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24178/osd/stencil.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24178/osd/kde-stencil.png

We've already discussed this a bit with GNOME and KDE designers, but
this mailing list sounds like a more appropriate place. Here's
something to work from -- http://gist.github.com/247170

Most of this deals with style, but it would be nice to see the
technical aspect discussed. Is the suffix the best way to approach
this? How do we treat these stencils as text in terms of color?

Let's get the ball rolling!

-- 
Jakub Steiner <jimmac at gmail.com>
http://jimmac.musichall.cz