New mimetype sheet – a proposal
Today, I was playing with the idea of redoing the base sheet used in all Oxygen mimetypes. It is infact getting a bit old, and also Nuno thought that it might use a little redesign.
I was feeling particularly inspired this morning, so I fired up inkscape and tried to mess around with the gradients, in order to create a new revision of the sheet. I knew that it wasn’t going to be a full redesign, since we don’t want a completely new design that breaks consistency, but simply a reshape of the colors and gradients to make it look more modern.
I concentrated mostly on the 32×32 size, since it’s the one that is the most commonly used, and I think I got pretty good results there. I’m also quite satisfied of the other sizes: i might still play a bit with the contrast of the 16×16 icon (the smallest) but I think I’m there.
This is what I came up with: (the new set is the one on the right)
So, what do you think?
EDIT: Ah, something I forgot… I was also thinking of putting the folded corner on the top-right, instead of bottom-right as it is now. Opinions?
Comment by onety-three — September 24, 2010 @ 12:52 pm
Good work, it looks cleaner and friendlier than before. I think this sort of contrast reduction might help other icons as well.
Deciding whether the folded corner would look better on the top right is hard, though. You might want to just try it and show it to us :/
Comment by Richard Hartmann — September 24, 2010 @ 1:05 pm
I prefer the new look. And yes, simply show us the other options, side by side.
Comment by Augusto Leite — September 24, 2010 @ 1:19 pm
Great icons. Maybe you guys could make a new design of the folder icon too. Altough it is great now, it is getting a little bit old too. Just an idea…
Keep up the great work
Comment by Wolfgang — September 24, 2010 @ 1:44 pm
Hi,
nice work. I can imaging pushing the folded corner to the top could work out well because at least me graps a new sheet on the top. It would be nice if you, as onety-three sugested, try it out and show it to us.
Cheers, Wolfgang
Comment by Karim — September 24, 2010 @ 1:57 pm
Nice job!
Your icons looks a lot better and imho smoother.
The old icons have a “dirty” look.
I’m using elementary icons instead of oxygen standard set because of the dark and dirty look of many icons.
Comment by m2j — September 24, 2010 @ 2:23 pm
Hi,
I prefer also your new gradients. Your paper is more in the background and leaves more room for the content. One thing: I’m not sure if the weak gradient disappears on cheep TN panels with bad color accuracy. You will know that better.
About the folding corner: I can imagine, that a folded corner with less then 45° angle on top right would look best (the angle between the fold and the former right border). I’ve just moved the old icon that way and tried it. But I don’t know, if this also works nice for low resolutions.
Another thing I just observed: Currently two items are looking quite same: text-plain and text-enriched. Maybe the RTF version could be enhanced by colored keywords.
Comment by uetsah — September 24, 2010 @ 6:37 pm
+1 for the new, smoother gradient…
The folded corner I’d leave at the bottom, though, because that way it takes less attention from the “content” fo the sheet. So when you decide that, be sure to not only look at the plain base sheet, but also check how the resulting composite icons will look.
Comment by Brian Beck — September 24, 2010 @ 6:51 pm
I think the new icons are difficult to see against a white background, which is the color used as the background of this page, and in dolphin.
Maybe it’s just me though, because all the other comments seem positive.
Comment by Robert Forsyth — September 26, 2010 @ 12:11 am
I also like the gradient.
Do we need a corner? Perhaps a slight bow (or curl) to the ‘paper sheet’.
Doesn’t Windows XP have the top right corner folded?
Comment by Ants Aasma — September 27, 2010 @ 9:15 am
I second Brian Beck, as it stands it’s hard to see. The outline needs more contrast.
Comment by m2j — September 30, 2010 @ 10:18 am
Brian, Ants: Maybe this is caused by your screen. Is is maybe a cheep TN panel and have you maybe changed brightness or contrast?
Robert: Your idea is nice, but I can’t imagine, how it should look like. About Windows XP: You’re right. But I’m not used to the XP look, because I switched completely to GNU/Linux/KDE in 2004 and never worked personally with XP. For me it just feels much more natural to grab papers on the upper corner.
Comment by furanku — September 30, 2010 @ 12:46 pm
Maybe a stupid question that has been answered a thousand times before, but why is it folded at all?