davigno

Update 26/Sep/07: Icon have been committed to KDE svn. Usuallly inspiration is good but it’s bad if it’s 7 in the morning and you worked all night long just because you felt you was inspired. Don’t know if this is normal but sometimes when I see a really inspiring icon design I can’t think to do anything else if not drawing a gorgeous icon as well. Thanks Nuno!So, it was sunday night (or better, monday morning) and I couldn’t go to bed because I had to draw something. I knew I would have to wake up at 8 because of an appointment but … Hey, I was feeling inspired. :)The icon that got my attention this time was nothing less than Konqueror web browser. This is one of those icons that we are afraid to do because are very popular applications. I had this idea in mind since some time already: Nothing totally new for Konqueror, it’s the usual globe plus cog but it had to be fit better the Oxygen application icons style. So I put the cog on a compatible 3D perspective and used a shiny nice globe. The cog now looks more like a base for the globe and the stars on the globe form a subtle “K” constellation. This one was a really tough icon with many reflections, and transparencies, but I’m kinda happy with the overall result. The icon scales down very well and has distinctive shape. As always, some retouches might happen before KDE 4. Peace.

So yesterday it was really productive. By my side I’ve been playing with new scrollbars for the style (wait next post). But I also wanted to make Dolphin default toolbar icons looks great. That took a lot of time, specially because every size needed a special version and that’s the result:

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One thing that is very nice with the new naming scheme for mimetype icons is that now much more file formats are covered. For example, kde used to have just one icon for all the audio format. Now we have 25! :)

This doesn’t mean we are going to have 25 different icons for audio files, but I thought it was a good idea to group file formats and to do an icon for each group. In the I found 5 categories:

• lossy compression: mp3, ogg, acc …
• lossless compression: flac, monkey …
• uncompressed (PCM): wave, aiff …
• midi
• speech

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Dolphin, next KDE 4 file manager, looks for folder icon at “mimetypes/inode-directory.png”. Follow current icon identikit:

• Name: inode-directory.png
• Address: oxygen/…/mymetypes/
• Profession: folder icon

All the special folder icons are located under “places” directory and use a different kind of name having “folder-” as prefix… like “folder-important.png” or “folder-yellow.png”.

So my question is: Shouldn’t the regular folder icon be located under “places” directory as well and be called just “folder.png”?

Looking at freedesktop icon naming specification seems like I’m correct (see Table 11. Standard Place Icons names). Then, the new identikit for the regular folder icon would be:

• Name: folder.png
• Address: oxygen/…/places/

Just to spice up this post a bit the new folder also comes in many different tasty flavors:

And of course most of all the special directories are already on svn too.

Missing are:

• home directory
• packages directory
• binaries/software directory

If you think you have a proposal for a special directory that I haven’t thought of yet, feel free to let me know ;)

Oxygen folders have changed already 3 times since I first started the project back to 2005. That’s because “folders” are really important, and together with “file sheet” and basic actions, they really define the look and feel of the desktop.

First Oxygen folders (the 2 on top of the screenshot below) were really far from what I now consider functional design. They were already very nice icons but the perspective was making them look odd already at 64×64 size. They also lacked some realism in lighting and details.
For these reasons I liked to try with a frontal view, and you got the folder design that has been “official” since yesterday. The new frontal view had less curves, allowing SVG to resize smoothly even at really small resolutions. But the icon was a place holder. Every year, when I look back to the stuff I’ve done, I discover I now can do much better. The folder icon was looking heavy, and was also a really heavy SVG, almost 200 KB. Looking at the vector file I discovered many imprecisions and small errors that I could had avoided. So, instead of fixing it, I thought it was better to completely re-do the design. And now, with much less vectors and nodes, 2 gradients and using gaussian blur for shadow, I got what I really wanted, a light and fresh folder design. I’m sure many users were already fans of the old design, but believe me, try the new folders (it’s already on SVN) for a month and I bet you’ll love them too ;). I hope there won’t be any big changes in the future, but as usual, minor variations may happen.