OSD symbols

[Bastien Nocera]

On Wed, 2009-12-02 at 14:18 +0100, Jakub Steiner wrote:
> 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

You should compare comparable things. The first screenshot is from
gnome-settings-daemon without any compositing manager. Enable a
compositing manager and it will certainly look different.

See the "dark and sharp" image at:
http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/mclasen/2009/10/29/pixel-perfect-is-just-not-good-enough/

> 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

bluetooth-discoverable is useless

> 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!