Re: GNUstep Icons and look proposal

[Nicolas Roard]

Le 18 août 04, à 09:28, Riccardo a écrit :

> Unfortunately it is so, lately looks and eye-candy have grown in 
> importance. I strongly disagree with most, but that is not a point. We 
> need to attract users...
> You say we need developers, my small little opinion is that if a 
> developer stops at the looks, then well, he isn't a real developer... 
> but we are starting to get polemic..

Well, it's not exactly that. Imagine a developer who doesn't know 
GNUstep/ObjC, and barely have any idea if it's good or not. He looks at 
some screenshots, and its conclusion is "well, if they don't took the 
time to have nice looking application, this thing is surely not really 
worth it". Moreover, he could also think that he wants good-looking 
applications with a modern look and he could think that GNUstep can't 
provides that.
Our first movement is always to look at the "exterior". After, well, 
you could want to go deeper or not in the subject, whatever the look. 
But it's not surprising that most
people forms first opinions by the look.
Myself, I started to be interested in GNUstep because I really liked 
the NeXTSTEP UI :-) (well, and I also knew that the dev environment was 
touted as very good..)

> > Icons are one of the very important key in how a program looks. And 
> > frankly, the current icons set in GNUstep is not very sexy and looks 
> > old (by the way, it has nothing to do with the "NeXT theme" -- most 
> > NeXT icons are relatively beautiful even by today's standards :)
> Hmm, our own icons don't look very next-ish at all often and also they 
> look like a mix.

well, our own icons are not really nice, yes.

> > We could want to change the look of GNUstep apps (eg, themes), but 
> > one thing that needs to be changed in the first place is the icons 
> > set, because icons are comparatively much harder to do than the 
> > themes support (eh, looks at 
> > http://www.roard.com/screenshots/screenshot_theme37.png for what's 
> > coming on soon..).
> Personally I don't like it, but I see that others could like it.

In fact, I really like the NeXT UI, you know :) (but with a brighter 
gray, though)
But I think it's also important to provides other looks (if only for 
attracting people). The goal in fact is not to provides _one_ new 
theme, but to provide the mechanisms
to create themes. I think it's important to have for example a Windows 
theme (for GNUstep/Windows) or even a MacOSX theme (for GNUstep/OSX 
^_^) ...

> > Sadly for us, we are a bunch of programmers, not graphists. Most of 
> > us are not very good at icons design, and the few of us that are not 
> > too bad do not have much free time left anyway.  We could try to rip 
> > already existing icons (for
> This is a problem. Indeed.
> You may have noticed that "PRICE" and "Stepulator" are without an 
> icon. This is really because I miss one and I don't know how to draw 
> one myself. And please mind that I am a decently skilled artist 
> (although Icon design requires always extra skills) but the prooblem 
> starts even with the idea that needs to be represented. For stepulator 
> it might be easier, for PRICE not.
> And also as you say, I prefer to spend my free time coding apps than 
> designing icons.
>
> Not because I think icons are not important in the overall GNUstep 
> user experience, on the contrary. But I feel that at the current 
> status of GNUstep time is still better spent in coding...

I generally agree, but we should also think about the look.

> > As much as we would have prefered to have free icons, it doesn't seem 
> > to be possible, and waiting for a nice graphist doing all our works 
> > doesn't seem to work either. On the other hand, if we pay somebody 
> > for this work, we will be sure to have our icons.
> I feel that having real "free" icons would be better.
> On the other side, if the artwork goes into "LGPL" then at the end 
> there is nothing wrong with it.

Well, obviously we would like to have free icons -- it's not because it 
will be done by a profesionnal that the icons won't be free after that 
(frankly, I think that's something we could agree with the graphist, 
moreover if he knows about free software or have already participated 
in it -- as long as he is payed, I don't think he will disagree, we are 
not a company, but a FSF project).

> I see that some guidelines are restrictive, like
> http://www.quentinmathe.com/gnustep/documentation/UI/icons/c166.html
>
> This rule has been broken a lot of times.   Think about firefox, iCab 
> and, surprisingly, a lot of browsers.
>
> YOu may say that many  designs Icons wrong, but what I am trying to 
> say is that those guidelines apply easily to common stuff like "sytem 
> tools" or "common applications" (like word, photoshop, email client). 
> But for other applications it gets very difficult

Sure. Rules are here to be broken, sometimes ;-)
But theses guidelines seems sensible (at least to me), and obviously, 
it would then be better to follow them if possible.
I am myself in the wrong with the icon I used for waiho :) but if 
(when?) I issue a new version, I will try to have a new icon.

> > - We consider that improving the current look of GNUstep UI will help 
> > tremendously to attract people
> > - We consider that one of the most important part of this work is the 
> > creation of new, modern-looking icons
> I would like to split this.
>
> For "standard" gnustep I'd like next-ish icons, homogeneous and 
> possibly well designed. This is not currently the case :(

yes, and that's exactly what we would like to improve.

> If you want to do themes, then among them you can put the icons you 
> want (preferably by following the same guidelines and by giving the 
> same "object" a different look, so to make it less confusing.)

Yes, that's already possible and it should be helped by the existence 
of the IconKit.

> One of the reasons why I prefer GNUstep (and CDE for the other side) 
> to other environments is still its clean, little intrusive design.
> This is even half-true for Aqua. Many of the original apple icons are 
> quite well designed, even if in a completely different context. WHile 
> many applications have Icons that jump out of the lines...

Well, we can't force developers anyway -- if they want icons that jump 
out of the lines,..
The only thing we can do is to provide clean icons by default, plus 
clean graphical elements, and guidelines.

> > - We propose to pay a graphist for theses icons and share the bill 
> > among us. It should be possible to use Adam Fedor's paypal account 
> > for example.
> I feel so poor...

eh :) it's ok.

> > - We propose an Icon's guidelines document to help keeping consistency
> The idea is very good. I t would be nice if this guide could have 
> ideas on "how to make it nextish" or "how to make it <insert your 
> theme here>" if you ever want to maintain officially some themes.

yes, but that's not as easy :)

> Also probably the guidelines need to be reviewed by many people. But 
> the start is good.

thanks. We would really like to have opinions about them..

> Also the icons of the various applications matter a lot, they should 
> be consistent with the look...

that's the purpose of the guidelines (and the purpose of the standard 
set of icons..)

thanks for the comments,

--
Nicolas Roard
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
 -Arthur C. Clarke