Echo Icon Theme "Perspective", Part III

It's been a while since I've last blogged about this topic. It's mostly because new semester is keeping my spare time low... But anyway I thought I should take the first step and make some conclusions from my previous posts.

We are starting Echo Perspective

Ok, it's not official yet and there are still things that need to be done, but I am practically starting new parallel icon set to the current Echo called Echo Perspective. As the name suggests it's going to be more or less same as the current one, only we'll be using perspective.

Since we are starting basically on a clean field we can afford some more or less radical changes to the current looks, like complete redesign of some icons, slightly different looks, etc. I've drawn a proof-of-concept video-display icon to outline what way I'd like Echo Perspective to take. My goals are (in no particular order):

• usability - an icon must be easily recognisable at all sizes, the metaphor must suggest it's meaning and thus must not be too much complex
• looks - we are aiming at the same time at more realistic look, we'd like to be slightly more realistic looking than mango or tango, but slightly less than oxygen
• modern - we will use modern metaphors where appropriate, for example we'll use wide screen flat LCDs in favour old 4:3 CRT ones
• cross desktop - we aiming this icon set to be default in some future version of Fedora, this means we need to satisfy as much Fedora users as we can, so we need to support all major Fedora desktop environments like Gnome, KDE or XFCE

What's Next

Well, we need to set up our infrastructure to allow us easily push Echo Perspective icons to our git repository. I am working on that, but given the amount of free time I currently have, it'll take a while. But we can create the icons without pushing them to git in the mean time. And there are a few decisions that need to be made.

Directory Based Icons

From time to time, we are criticised for not having the directories blue in Echo. Also the design is pretty oldish, modern systems have folders that are standing. Now the questions is, how to make them in Echo Perspective? Any ideas? Any designs? I'd like the wider community to help with this one. You need not to create whole icon - concept design is all we need. I hope we can gather a few and decide later which one to use. I've set-up a wiki page for it, but you can as well send the designs to the fedora-art-list.

Trash Can

Trash can is another icon that is in dire need of redesign. We'd like our trash can to look more modern, perhaps made of metal, perhaps from coloured glass, perhaps semitransparent, whatever. Submit your ideas on the above mentioned wiki page or at fedora-art-list.