XDG Icon Spec: requesting new icons for headsets, speakers, headphones

[Ted Gould]

On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 10:13 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> The problem is not the specification, or its maintainer. The problem is
> that developers don't give a damn about icons. They think they need an
> icon, and so they must have it. And the artists just want to draw icons,
> and not deal with all the political crap, for the most part. And there's
> no real communication between them. There's no real UI design happening.
> Apps just get thrown together as an compendium of features that the
> developers think the users actually need to use or even remotely care
> about, rather than considering what users really need, or how to present
> it to them without being overwhelming, and blithely throwing a bunch of
> icons at them, to make their interface seem "pretty" and give a false
> sense of usability. This is especially evident in KDE, where the main
> Oxygen artist has stated very bluntly to me that he does not wish to
> involve himself in suggesting to developers possibly better ways to
> present UI to the user, but rather simply wants to draw the icons. And
> the developers of course, do not ever ask for such feedback from said
> artist. Where in GNOME, as a result of that horrible travesty [1], the
> icon theme maintainers have sort of taken it upon ourselves to ask
> questions about an icon's usage when one is asked to be created, and to
> give feedback about potentially better ways to build the UI, and perhaps
> avoid the icon all together, when necessary, so that we can actually
> have proper metaphors for all the icons and their usage, and help
> improve the desktop's usability at the same time.

No, I think the problem is that people disagree about what the purpose
of the spec is.

        You clearly believe that it's a way to force applications
        towards a certain design principle.

        Other folks seem to see it as a way for applications that want
        to express the same thing to agree on a name for what that thing
        is.

Personally, I think that all we can do is hope for the second option and
encourage collaboration on those names.  The reality is that pushing
design guidelines between to visually diverse projects (not including
all the subprojects using the spec) will simply result in failure.  I
guess I'll reword your statement from Ken:

        [the spec should] not wish to involve [itself] in suggesting to
        developers possibly better ways to present UI to the user, but
        rather simply wants to [specify] the icons

I would say that design guidelines are more appropriately placed in
something like a HIG than the icon naming specification.

		--Ted

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