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.