Icons, logos, Tango, consistency, the user experience, and our project looks like a 2D champaign flute

[Remco]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 2:19 AM, Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com> wrote:
> Seems like a lot of fuss over a few trivial details:
> 1) The Wine system icon is ugly (I'm all in favour of changing it, but
> you make a BIG fuss over it)
> 2) If the icon is changed, it should be done in time for Ubuntu 9.10.
> (I have BIG issue with this. Wine is not exclusive to Ubuntu and
> Ubuntu should be given no additional thought time over any other
> distribution when making decisions.)
> 3) The glass is the wrong shape. Is it really THAT important? If
> anything it makes Wine distinguishable from the beverage. Do we get
> any outraged wine enthusiasts posting on wine-users or the forum
> telling us that we use the wrong glass in our logos?

There's no fuss. Just a call for discussion. If you need new icons,
you might as well make some plans about the time frame, and discuss
details like the actual icon development. Since Ubuntu is a big user
of Wine, it makes sense to cater to that user. Also keep in mind that
Fedora and OpenSuse have releases around that time too. It seems that
the distributions are indeed converging to similar release dates,
which Mark Shuttleworth called for.

> My final qualm about all of this:
> Isn't Tango an icon theme, and by going to a "Tango-compliant" icon,
> aren't we snubbing every other icon theme out there (in particular
> Crystal-SVG, or whatever it's called, the preferred theme on KDE)? We
> should not tie ourselves down to something that is only "preferred" on
> some systems (i.e. Gnome in this case).

Tango is not one theme, but a set of guidelines to make icons "fit in"
with major desktops such as Windows, Gnome, KDE, Mac OS X. I think it
was born out of Mozilla's Firefox icons that needed to fit in with all
those platforms. The Tango theme is one such example theme. But there
are others, such as Tangerine, Human, Foxtrot, Mist. Wine's icon would
not be part of any tango theme. It would just be a tango icon.

The new KDE icon guidelines are called Oxygen. It's like the Tango
guidelines, with a few differences. The old Crystal icon theme is a
theme, while consistent, without guidelines. It's just a theme.

Remco