Conversation

Notices

1. Tobias Bernard (tbernard@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 02:20:41 JST Tobias Bernard

   In case you were wondering why the LibreOffice icons look too big on the app grid or dash, this is why: They're the full height of the canvas, instead of using the smaller portrait base shape.

   The reason for those base shapes is that we need to balance circular, rectangular and other shapes optically in size (e.g. a circle with the same width as a square looks smaller).

   It also allows for more creative shapes, e.g. having an overlaid object (e.g. a pencil) stick out of the rectangle.

   • minute (mntmn@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 05:38:56 JST minute

     in reply to

     @tbernard i really appreciate that the gnome icons have individual shapes and are not just rounded rectangles btw

   • Tobias Bernard (tbernard@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 06:23:33 JST Tobias Bernard

     in reply to

     • Sergey Bugaev

     @bugaevc Yeah, just because something's an SVG doesn't mean it'll be sharp if you render it at any random resolution. For example, GNOME icons are hinted for 64 and multiples thereof, so they're sharp at 64, 128, 256, etc. and look okayish most of the time at 32 and 96.

     But if you render them some random resolution you'll get half-pixels instead of sharp lines, which looks blurry.

   • Sergey Bugaev (bugaevc@floss.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 06:23:34 JST Sergey Bugaev

     in reply to

     @tbernard maybe I'm misunderstanding how the pixel grid works though

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Sergey Bugaev (bugaevc@floss.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 06:23:35 JST Sergey Bugaev

     in reply to

     @tbernard either a hardcoded list or alpha hacks would work, and yes, both are terrible. I don't have any better ideas.

   • Tobias Bernard (tbernard@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 06:23:36 JST Tobias Bernard

     in reply to

     • Sergey Bugaev

     @bugaevc Setting aside that changing icons behind developer's backs is generally a bad idea, how?

     Even if you had a hardcoded list or some alpha channel heuristic that did it specifically only for these icons, you'd still not get a good result because everything would be off the pixel grid.

     This kind of thing can only be fixed upstream, realistically.

   • Sergey Bugaev (bugaevc@floss.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 06:23:36 JST Sergey Bugaev

     in reply to

     @tbernard realistically, they're not changing their icons upstream just because of GNOME.

     It's not changing icons, it's just picking the best scale to display them? The shell already displays icons with different scales in different contexts, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.

     Re pixel grid — aren't they supposed to be scalable svgs? If not, how do we know they really fit on the pixel grid now — have LO specifically optimized their icons for display in GNOME? (evidently no)

   • Tobias Bernard (tbernard@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 06:23:38 JST Tobias Bernard

     in reply to

     If you'd like to know more about how to make great app icons, the HIG has you covered: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/guidelines/app-icons.html

   • Sergey Bugaev (bugaevc@floss.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 06:23:38 JST Sergey Bugaev

     in reply to

     @tbernard can the shell scale them down auto-magically?

   • Tobias Bernard (tbernard@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 06:23:39 JST Tobias Bernard

     in reply to

     The new icons are otherwise a big improvement in terms of style and execution, but this still makes them stick out, unfortunately :(

   • Tobias Bernard (tbernard@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 22:44:04 JST Tobias Bernard

     in reply to

     • minute

     @mntmn Thanks! I agree, I think we struck a nice balance between flexible/easy to draw and uniqueness. 5 years later I'm still very happy with how the style turned out.