Taking a look at Rob Bradford’s Open Moko post I noticed something really nice. The notification area icons weren’t some multi-colored blurry blobs and they looked great. They are crisp and clean. With the exception of one of the more busy icons I can readily tell what each one of them does.
Why do we waste our artist’s time adjusting icons for smaller resolutions instead of having them concentrate on the bigger beautiful full color icons? For every icon an artist produces they unusually need to produce two smaller icons at lesser detail since scaling inevitably just makes the lower resolution icons look horrible. This creates extra work and the results are far from perfect. The advantage of black and white icons are that they are simple to create, for the most part can match any theme and produce much sharper icons at lower resolutions. Since we agree mostly on metaphors one set could be produced to work with the majority of themes out there. Elegance through simplicity.
This has been running around in my mind for awhile now, especially after working with the OLPC two tone icon set 
. Apple does this too.
I am all for it!
Comment by Christian Kellner — August 30, 2007 @ 1:47 pm
Keep in mind that the neo has a 28DPI screen, so it aren’t low-res icons.
Comment by Koen — August 30, 2007 @ 1:52 pm
That’s a good idea, but how to make it a standard?
I can’t but if you can, make a set of icons with this idea; you can demonstrate with your work the efficacy of it.
I’m a web designer, and i work quite well with Gimp.
If i can help you, tell me, you have my email with this post
Cisco
Comment by Cisco — August 30, 2007 @ 1:52 pm
Thought++
Comment by John Drinkwater — August 30, 2007 @ 1:56 pm
Koen,
You mean 280DPI I gather?
Of course those icons right now are being displayed on my 72dpi monitor and still look great
Comment by J5 — August 30, 2007 @ 2:01 pm
Oh and using SVG for the source one can scale them to any dpi for final output. Also if they are simple strokes one can also do effects like embossing which would look good in some panel configurations.
Comment by J5 — August 30, 2007 @ 2:04 pm
Actually I had to pixel-align most of the smaller size icons in Sato as well.
In GNOME, HighContrast icon theme might be what you are looking for and we’re working hard on that as well, even though the regular set got most of the love in this release.
Comment by Andreas Nilsson — August 30, 2007 @ 2:11 pm
Great idea. I see this being particularly useful and practical to implement amongst the core Gnome applications that have panel / notification area icons. I agree with J5 who mentioned that doing these as SVG would make them the most flexible and allow for interesting effects to be applied to them in a sane way.
Taking it a step further, might it be possible to classify icons so that they represent particular “services” for the user? Meaning that the icon is not necessarily tied to a particular program? For example, IIRC, both Banshee and Rhtyhmbox provide panel icons that are similar. Perhaps they simply ask for the “Music player panel icon” and the system displays the icon that the user has chosen for “music player”. This approach has some obvious drawbacks, but it seems like it might be interesting to explore.
Now, playing devil’s advocate:
-What about programs that change the color of their panel icon to indicate status and/or get attention?
-What about collisions? By simplifying the icons so much, it makes it much more likely that the icons for two programs could become indistinguishable from one another.
- What about other things that live in the panel? Say, system monitor graphs. They clearly are not icons, but should they be brought into the “visual cohesiveness” fold? If so, how?
None of these questions are necessarily hard problems to solve, simply things that must be considered.
Comment by Qhartman — August 30, 2007 @ 2:18 pm
I totally agree. I’m doing well with the MonoBlack theme, all that is left for me is Gossip and gnome-power-manager.
Comment by Ross — August 30, 2007 @ 2:42 pm
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
These PDA & mobile devices and their UIs have made me thinking actually even further. I keep going back watching the
http://www.rasterman.com/files/eem.avi !
The reason is the menu system. I think some similarish concept COULD work also on desktop computers. It also seems.. Erm.. neat.
Comment by erik — August 30, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
Oh come on, Gentle GNOME design proposal was suggesting this kind of icons ~2 years ago
And noone bothered implementing it 
Comment by prokoudine — August 30, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
To an extent I agree, except the fuzzy set on the screenshot doesn’t go well with what you’re saying
The high contrast set certainly deserves more interest than it gets.
Comment by Jakub Steiner — August 30, 2007 @ 4:27 pm
This reminds me of a little bit of advice about icon design I read long ago, from a forgotten source. It said to first make your icon work (i.e. be instantly recognizable, distinguishable, understandable, etc.) in black and white, and only then add color to enhance a graphic design that is fundamentally sound.
Comment by Nigel Tao — August 30, 2007 @ 6:24 pm
I love the look! If everyone did a crisp greyscale icon the colors could be adjusted to match the colors of the panel. It would look very sharp no mater what your color scheme.
Comment by Russell Harrison — August 30, 2007 @ 8:56 pm
A huge reason why OLPC and OpenMoko look crisp is they have a high-dpi display, and their designers expect to have a high-dpi display for use.
Unfortunately in the GNOME case we try very very hard to force a 96dpi display even for screens able to do more (going so far as overriding the pixel density X correctly detects, cf the font applet), so we optimise for legacy apps and developper legacy bitmap fonts.
Until GNOME is changed to use the highest pixel density hardware exposes by default, forcing app developper to take pixel density changes into account, designers will continue wasting their time on low-res blurry graphics instead of exploring the possibilities of modern hardware (displays>96dpi have been common in laptops for years. Somehow the short-sighted 96-dpi clamp hack made us totally miss the boat on them -> GNOME bug #104341)
Comment by Nicolas Mailhot — August 31, 2007 @ 3:48 am
Any fuzziness in the screenshot is the result of my scaling it down from the original image.
Comment by Rob Bradford — August 31, 2007 @ 7:18 am
Uh. And you spelt my name wrong
Comment by Rob Bradford — August 31, 2007 @ 10:40 am
I agree with you! I can help to make the icons too.
Comment by mov — August 31, 2007 @ 12:10 pm
Rob, sorry about that. Fixed
Comment by J5 — August 31, 2007 @ 1:28 pm
mov,
Well, I’m just cheerleading here. I wish I had time or artistic ability. But if you do a set (I would start with status and applets) I would use and pimp it.
Comment by J5 — August 31, 2007 @ 1:31 pm