Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: [Libreoffice-ux-advise] Libre Icons.zip

Hi,

> > > * Its meaning is unclear to me—it looks like a "double traffic light"
> > > and doesn't seem to have any relation to documents/a suite/an office
> > > etc.
>
> > I don't understand the reason for eight corners - the icon looks like a
> > shield, it resembles rather a virus protect product than an office suite.
[...]
> Here was what I was thinking when I made the icon: I made a shape that is the same as the paper 
> they used in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. All of their paper had the corners cut off, 
> making it an irregular octagon. I even looked up the exact dimensions of the paper used in BSG. 
> Then I added six hexagons. Each hexagon is the color of one of the six applications presented in 
> the LibreOffice starting screen. I even went so far as to take a screenshot, and then use the 
> color picker to get the exact right color for each hexagon. In each case, I "picked" the color 
> from the center of the triangle in the upper-right corner. Formula is the exception. I just went 
> with black for that one.

All your perfectionism (which is good!) aside, as you can see from our
reactions, it is easy to misunderstand your icon. It is great that you
thought outside the box, but in the end we need an icon that still
works for our users even though they think inside the box. The
problems here are:
* we don't cater to geeks exclusively (in fact, some geeks rather
despise WYSIWYG software)
* LibO ships worldwide, even to countries where Battlestar Galactica never ran
* LibO has nothing to do with the show (it is not, e. g.,  a
Battlestar Galactica episode guide)
* a square sheet of paper is by far the stronger metaphor
So, with your current draft, this only leaves the option to explain
the reference prominently on the home page (but eighty percent of our
users likely won't even read the explanation).
Then there's the question: will the community and commercial Linux
distributors be able to identify with the icon? As a contributor, I,
for one, couldn't.

This all means you'll have to make the icon work even without the
reference (you don't have to remove the reference entirely, just make
it non-essential for the icons meaning).

> I know that the quality is poor. That's why I included a 512x512 version: I am a poor artist, so 
> I would expect that a talented artist on your team would want to edit the icon to make it look 
> more professional. The smaller PNG's are only for folks to imagine what the icon COULD look like 
> at various resolutions after an artist has his or her way with it.

Please note that for such purposes, we generally use vector-based
formats (that is, SVG and ODG).


> I'm neither a programmer or graphic designer.
[...]
> I look for ways that I can contribute to FOSS. A suggestion for a new icon theme seemed to be one 
> of those ways.

Yes, please do try to contribute and of course you need to be neither
programmer nor a graphic designer or be allowed to donate money. Thus,
please do create a Whiteboard page, so that anyone interested in
improving your proposal/you can work on it further.
But there are plenty of other things you can do, such as
reproducing/entering bugs, or making proposals how to change LibO
behaviour to make it more usable.


> I'm also working on getting my employer to host a page that publicly thanks the makers of all the 
> FOSS that we use. So far, my only argument that such a page isn't an illegal government 
> endorsement is that whitehouse.org publicly acknowledges using and contributing code to Drupal.

This is a great idea, because it will highlight how far
opensource/free software has come. I wish you the best of luck with
this.

Regards, Astron.

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