Sunday 22 February 2009

We've gone a long way…

… but we are still far from finish. I am talking about Echo Icon Theme. Its history is long and full of twist and contributors. It started as a personal project by former RedHat employee Diana Fong and it was targeted as a replacement for the aging bluecurve icon theme. The original draft looked like this:

The icon set quickly gained popularity among Fedora user base, but contributors were few, development slow and we missed the important part of making it default in Fedora (because it was not complete enough). This question of completeness has been haunting us ever since.

It's nostalgic to see what were my first contributions – I had practically no experience in graphics, but wanted to see the set improved. Here you can see my very first sketch:

As you can see, it is not-so-ugly icon with well distinguished shape, but with totally different style, as were pointed out by the Art members at that time (Luya and Nicu will maybe remember ;-)). I've finally ended with this:

I'd say, not bad for a first try, but this icon is no longer in Echo... I've replaced it much later with desing more consistent with our new apporach to echo.

The slight shift in design is nicely seen e.g. on these icons:




And now we're even starting something even more different – Echo Perspective. Here are some expamples of the initial progress:





Well, you might ask why starting anew when there are already great themes like tango or oxygen, what will happen to the original Echo and much more, why don't we rather join tango, … We cannot give you straight answers. It happend so that we like Echo and would like to see it being default in Fedora sometime in the future, but we also need to keep up with others – and that means perspective projection. We believe that neither Echo nor Echo Perspective is a lost case and that there are reason strong enough for us to continue working on these, but you might disagree. Well, at least, with the perspective theme, we can share a lot with tango or oxygen. Even though we have different style, the shapes can now be very similar and it should not be hard in the future to easily adapt echo-perspective icons to tango or oxygen guidelines.

And how far have I gone? In short very far. In longer – from an ocassional contributor to main contributor and practicaly the Echo Icon Theme project leader... Also as you can see from the images above, my inkscape skills have improved a lot ;-)

As you can see, on my very example, it's not actually hard to join Echo. Yep, the standars were risen a bit, but so was the infrastructure and we can call our project mature now. And we will be happy to welcome new contributors. Don't be shy and share your work/ideas with us. We will in turn help you to became a full-fledged Echo Icon Theme contributor :-) Fedora-art-list is the right place to start.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The default icon theme in Fedora should be the same as the default icon theme for GNOME. If you want to change that, make the change upstream in GNOME.

Luya Tshimbalanga said...

How time went so fast! Being so busy with school stuff and outside activity, it was harder to keep track on Echo itself. All I can said is Kudos, Martin, for keeping that project in shape with the tools adapted from Jimmac, restructuring git repository and so on.

We believe that neither Echo nor Echo Perspective is a lost case and that there are reason strong enough for us to continue working on these, but you might disagree.

Well, it has been years and Echo and its derivative still stands. As you have state, the project reaches its maturity


Well, at least, with the perspective theme, we can share a lot with tango or oxygen.
Also ManGo which is an update from Tango iconset.

nicu said...

Learning is one of the best thing you (and the others involved in the project) acquired: not only Inkscape skills, but also knowledge about general icon design, usability, scripting, collaboration... so even if the icon set is not as popular as you probably hoped, the overall result is, I think, positive.

Martin said...

anonymous, default whatever theme is one of the things that may be desirable for each distribution to customize. At least, that is what I believe. Keep in mind that distribution is not only GNOME, but also XFCE, KDE, and much more and it might be better to have distro specific defaults - if there is consensus that it is better than upstream default and if there is enough manpower.

Luya, thanks. Would be great to see you having some time for Echo again in the future ;-) As for Mango I try to keep an eye on it, as you'll probably see for yourself soon ;-)

nicu, I totally agree.