 Hello everybody, my name is Tobias. I'm a designer at the GNOME project and I also work for Purism and this talk is going to be about the general approach to icons in GNOME and how that's changed over the last few years and some of the developments in that area. When it comes to icons in GNOME and I guess the free desktop in general, everything sort of goes back to the Tango project, which was this big standardization effort in the mid-2000s that created the framework that all of the sort of icon infrastructure that we have now is kind of based on and I think it's important to like talk about that a little bit as a start. One of the big ideas with Tango is that there are multiple sizes for every icon. So there's one for 16, 24 or 32 and they're all pixel-hindered for one exact resolution and a big part of that also statistically is that there are these one-pixel strokes that are exactly on the pixel grid so it will be sharp at that specific resolution. And then if the icon is used as a different size, then a different variant basically of this is used. Stylistically, Tango icons always have like a photorealistic kind of 3D perspective icon at the large sizes and then at the smaller sizes, they generally the perspectives pair back a bit, so it fits better on the pixel grid. So all that Tango stuff applies to all icons, but in terms of actual use cases, there are two relatively different categories. On one hand, there's the app icons, which are the identity of an app and the thing that you click on when you launch an app. And then there are the icons that we use in applications, for example, like that three line icon for the primary menu. So over the last few years, the way we approach both of these categories has changed quite significantly and that's basically what I want to talk to you about today. So first up, app icons. I think this is gonna be the majority of the talk, both because it's more kind of exciting and interesting to look at and also because it's a bit further along. So if you use GNOME or are generally following the free software desktop ecosystem, you're probably aware that we've made some significant changes to the way we do app icons over the past two years and a big part of the reason why I wanted to do this talk is to tell the story of how that happened a little bit, give some background and kind of share some fun behind the scenes stuff. Let's look at the status quo in app icons before we started this whole initiative. Basically, what you would do is you would first draw one super high-resolution photorealistic version of the icon and then you would sort of scale it down and pixel-hint it and like make it work at each of the smaller resolutions one by one. And then in the end you would still have to draw a symbolic, which is the black and white version. So this is a breakdown of all the sizes that you would have to draw for every single icon and yeah, it's a lot. And the funny thing is that a lot of those sizes were never even really seen by anyone because in the shell we either use the really large size or the symbolic and so a lot of those smaller hinted ones were never really exposed anywhere. And then of course with this very complicated workflow with the super high detail like large size and then all those hinted smaller sizes that takes a lot of craftsmanship and very few people, especially in our community, which doesn't really have many designers, are capable of doing those. And even for those people it used to take weeks to make one single application icon. And that over time like has the effect that the style kind of stagnates because updating all of the icons was basically an impossible task. Of course, if there's only a handful of people who can do these icons and it takes them a long time, there is no way they can do icons for every single third-party app, even if the third-party apps come asking, because it just doesn't scale, right? And so you end up with third-party apps having really bad icons. And another problem we had was just that general industry visual trends have changed over the last decade or so. And with that sort of the assumptions that app authors that ship applications across platforms have when it comes to icons. And so for example, the new Firefox icon is a lot flatter, a lot simpler than it used to be. And apps like that started to stick out compared to the pre-installed system apps, and that wasn't great. And the other thing that's changed is just the hardware people have, because if you have a high DPI display that scales everything to X, that kind of changes the assumptions that are like sort of behind those ideas of pixel hinting and one pixel strokes and so on. And we really felt like we needed a more future-proof approach for that. To illustrate the issue with third-party app, as I mentioned, these are some of the icons of major third-party apps for GNOME at the time. And as you can see, a few of them did have decent icons that fit in with the overall platform style, usually when a GNOME designer sort of like came in and helped out. But generally the picture was pretty bleak and it really didn't feel good to have some of the best apps for the platform have icons this terrible. And that brings us to the beginning of our story here. So in April of 2018, I visited Jakob Steiner in the Czech Republic. Jakob, if you don't know him, he's one of the earliest, I think, designers who got involved in free software ever. He's been on the GNOME design team since forever. He was involved with Tango and various other things in the past. But basically we were meeting up to work on some shell stuff at the time and I think one day over lunch we randomly kind of came upon the topic of icons and discussed all the various problems that I just enumerated and started throwing around some ideas for how to improve that situation. I think fundamentally what we realized is that we needed a style that would allow it for other people, not just us, the GNOME design team, to draw like good icons for apps. So how could we do that? Obviously the elephant in a room is all those different sizes, a lot of which weren't used because that we found is a major issue for new people starting to draw icons and a major tinesack when updating things. So one core idea was to have a single source of truth sort of color icon. We only draw it once and since we aren't really using it at the smaller sizes, we felt that we could probably get away with either unhinted or some kind of trick there and we also definitely wanted a simpler style with less details and a simpler aesthetic that's like much easier to draw without all these highlights and shadows and so on, but we definitely didn't want to go all iOS kind of flat. We definitely wanted to keep some dimensionality but sort of make it more accessible and then other things are for example previously all of these different apps had baked in drop shadows, but they would all do it differently and the perspective was different and somewhere bigger others didn't have a shadow at all and so on. So that was pretty ugly and so the idea was we don't do a baked in shadow at all and we'd apply it in the shell or in GTK or whatever displays the actual icon and we also had some ideas for how to improve the actual workflow of drawing icons to make that more approachable such as having an icon grid so it's easier to sort of size and place things in a way that will look good with other icons so that some icons don't go all the way to the border and others are really tiny and also a better color palette with a better system around that and various other kind of tooling related ideas and then on the train home to Berlin I started sketching out some of these ideas so I put together a very basic icon grid where I just took the 64 pixel base size and split it sort of 16 times and then made these base shapes on that and started sketching some icons on that grid as you can see they're pretty terrible, but they sort of started us off in that path of simplifying to this relatively high degree and like going in a more geometric direction. I also tried this this inset shadow to get a little bit of depth without having to actually you know draw perspective which obviously didn't work, but yeah, it was a start and then I sent this to Jakob and we iterated on this a bunch of times sent things back and forth and that's that's kind of how the whole thing got started. So over the next few weeks we started sketching more icons exploring the style kind of like how would we do depth playing with the base shapes and so on and also setting up a more comprehensive new color palette and just generally discussing some ideas for how tooling could could support this whole workflow and one thing that we discovered relatively early on is that the one-size-rule-the-wall idea actually really works surprisingly and once you've tried that sort of single source of truth workflow, it's just so much better. It's really good. So you might be asking yourself, but what about pixel-hinting? and what we discovered is that we can draw at 64 nominal size but if we keep the 32 in the back of our minds while doing that and kind of align as many things as possible to the 32 pixel grid, then we basically get 32, 64, 96 and 128 kind of for free with one size because basically those are all multiples of 32 and those are all the sizes that we actually use app icons at other than really small ones which are symbolic anyway and then yeah, basically with these two sizes, we covered the entire range of places that we need app icons for. For the app icon grid we iterated a number of times. We started off with this very simplistic geometric thing that looks great if you just look at the base shapes, but if you actually sort of make icons with it, they look weird. For example, like you want the circle to be a little bit bigger than everything else because otherwise the icons end up feeling smaller. You want the narrow shapes to be not quite that narrow because otherwise they look weird next to others. And you really want a baseline that most of the icons rest on so that if you see them next to each other, they kind of are aligned. This is the color palette that we ended up with after a few iterations. It's nothing too spectacular. It has five different shades of each of the main colors. There's a slight hue shift there between the lighter ones and the darker ones. It's a little bit more vibrant than the tango palette we had before. It's also worth noting the grays. That's something we kept from tango. The grays are tinted. They're not like just sort of straight up gray grays. There's like a little bit of color in each of them and that gives things a bit more of a distinctive vibrant feel. So after a few weeks of just me and Jakob playing around with things, sending stuff back and forth, Lapo Kalamande joined us. He's also a longtime gnome designer and did many of the old icons. We started drawing a lot more icons. We started trying some stylistic flourishes, trying to see how this was going to work for a lot more of the core icons. I think this is also when we started coming up with this perspective thing that we ended up with. The perspective is I think one of the most interesting aspects of this whole style because basically we wanted to keep some kind of like 3D depth in there. We didn't want to go like all flat or material or whatever, but we also wanted it to be really easy to draw. This kind of flattened perspective is really interesting because it basically glues together the top and the front of the object, thereby sort of keeping it really easy to draw. Like you can just use rectangles or circles or whatever, but it still has that depth. And then in a lot of cases, since we have this standardized 8 pixel rounded corner on a lot of things, there are these shiny gradients on the corners and that's a small like stylistic flourish that gives it a bit of personality, but really like keeps it easy to draw. And I also have to note that I was initially against this whole idea. I think my view initially was that this was going to be too complicated and not applicable to enough things, but I think it was Lapo who convinced us that this is the way to go and we evidently stuck with it and I think it was the right decision. One of the motivators for this whole initiative was that GNOME had recently started doing nightly versions of apps. So basically, thanks to Flatback, you could already install like the in development version of the next release of, I don't know, like GNOME clocks or something during the previous cycle. And obviously we wanted to have separate icons for that so you can tell the difference when you have them in the shell. And the prospect of redrawing all of our icons like with as a nightly variant in the old style wasn't very appealing. And one of the ideas with this new style was that we would have a way to automatically generate a nightly version from the original icon. Initially, we tried a whole bunch of things such as a color filter or like this beta batch on the left here. But eventually what we ended up doing is basically this overlaid semi-transparent stripe along the bottom. And that's basically just like taking this stripe shape that covers the bottom third of the icon and intersecting it with the alpha channel of the icon. It took a while to get all the tooling pieces in place but now we actually have an automatic way of generating these nightly icons from the regular icon in icon preview. And it's pretty magical. Huge kudos to Julian Sparber for figuring all of that out. So timeline-wise we're somewhere around late June, early July now. And that's when Sam Hewitt joined us who's also a longtime GNOME contributor and a really good icon designer. And as you can see around that time the style really started to stabilize. We had the perspective more or less figured out we had the color palette more or less figured out. And as you can see this still uses the old grid with the really narrow shapes. But we would figure that out eventually as well. And we started feeling like this was going to be a real thing that is going somewhere. In July we were also at Gwadec in Spain. Gwadec is the yearly GNOME conference. And but at that point we felt confident enough with what we had that we gave a small internal presentation to some interested people. And I think it was very well received and we felt after that that this was something we wanted to actually pursue and try to get into the next release. Which would have been 3.30 in the fall. And around this time we also started working on some new tools to support this whole new style and workflow. And the way it started was very kind of random and organic. I think Xander Braun was initially trying to debug a symbolic icon issue in some app. And so he made this little demo. And then somehow that developed into an actual app to preview sort of a symbolic icon and see if it renders and recolors correctly. But then I convinced him to add support for high color icons. So it could basically like show those as well. And like so you could see the icon with the actual proper shadows at multiple sizes. But then later we also added the new like source formats so that in the same file you can have a symbolic icon and a high color icon for an app. And so we added that. And then eventually like we added export and like nightly icon rendering. And then to sort of like bring things full circle in the end we actually removed the symbolic rendering part from this app and split it out into a separate symbolic app called symbolic preview. And so there's like a long and complicated history there. But yeah basically the whole initiative started then and kind of has been going ever since. And so in the weeks after Wadek with UI freeze coming up we basically tried to finish the set draw all the missing icons for core apps and utilities and all of the things that are hidden in a folder in the app grid that you never really use. And like the folders and the mind types and all of that. And as you can see from these examples the style was pretty solid at that point. We had the final iteration of the grid with the thicker base shapes and the baseline. And yeah things were really coming together. Unfortunately in the end we didn't manage to get it into 330 because while we were like done with most of the assets in time we also needed to actually get them merged and making merge requests to like 40 apps is pretty time consuming. And I think we had like maybe another week or so before UI freeze. So in the end we like had to push it to the next release which was 332 in March. And then that fall we had another hackfest this time in Berlin which was basically Jakub and I because I think Lapo bailed. And yeah essentially we worked on polishing the core apps that we had and various third-party apps because we were already starting to submit icons to third-party apps even though like sort of we hadn't actually shipped the style for the core GNOME stuff yet but we were already using it for third-party stuff and like new apps that were coming out and so on. And these are some of the first app icons that actually shipped in apps. As you can see quite a few of these apps are among the ones that I had on the slide earlier with third-party apps with bad icons. So those were among the first that we wanted to get fixed. And then also just like new apps that were coming out like the Librim 5 calls app or podcasts where we just went straight to the new style. And then in January we finally made the actual official announcement of the whole initiative with the blog post kind of explaining the rationale and like various details and the new developer guidelines were out and all that. Basically you get people ready for the 332 release in March so that ideally apps would already start thinking about changing their icons. And in early March we had another hack fest again in Berlin. And this time there were also some developers Julian Sparber and Jordan Petridius. And the focus was basically getting nightly icon support in AppIcon Preview. And then a week after that GNOME 332 was released with the new icons for all of the core apps and some changes to the system to accommodate that. And I think it was pretty much universally where we're saved which is unusual for changes this big. But yeah so that was good. And then a few weeks later distribution started to actually ship with the new GNOME version and the new icons. This is a screenshot of Fedora 30. And one of the interesting things that you can see here is sort of the difference between first party and third party icons is so much less pronounced than it used to be. If you sort of look at Firefox or LibreOffice they fit in so much better with the new icons than they did with the previous Super 3D ones. And while we're looking at the icons in the wild they were not only cool on the desktop but also on mobile. This is a photo of the Libre 5 with all of the core apps and the whole bunch of third party ones. And they're all using the new style. But of course the release of GNOME 332 was not really the end of this initiative. In some ways it was just the beginning. Because one of the things that we had really wanted from this new style was the ability to more easily and more frequently update the core app icons. And that's also what we've done the last few cycles. So for example between 332 and 334 we updated the simple scan icon because we found that people like couldn't really tell it was a scanner I think Sam came up with this very nice x-ray idea and now I think it's one of the coolest icons we have. Or for example last cycle we changed the image viewer from this like low contrast yellow gradient to something a bit more contrasty. And I think we'll keep doing this maybe updating three, four, five icons every cycle to keep things fresh and also improve things over time. But one of the most exciting things about the new style is that with this new faster workflow it's really possible to do an icon within a few hours and over the course of a week like do multiple iterations and so on. And that's really allowed us to help third-party developers out with icons at a much larger scale than we ever could. So these are a few of the icons that I did for third-party apps but there's many, many more and the situation there is so much better than it's ever been. It's really great. But even with the new faster style it still doesn't scale for us the design team to do every single third-party app icon. But that's why we put a lot of effort into documentation and tutorials and sort of making sure that the onboarding experience for our tools is good in order to hopefully foster an environment where third-party apps do their own icons for the most part. And there's actually quite a few decent ones these days. All of the icons on this slide were done by the developers themselves with no input from us as far as I know and while they're not like super sophisticated these are all pretty good and so much better than sort of the baseline random icons the developer does used to be. So I think we've definitely made progress here. It's time for our first demo. I'm going to give you a quick overview of app icon preview and the whole new app icon drawing workflow. Okay, so for the sake of the example let's assume that I've written a notes app and now I want to make an icon for it. So let's click new app icon and put in the name and this is just a regular reverse domain notation name the same that you use for your flatback manifest and so on. So skipping ahead a bit here's Inkscape and app icon preview both showing the same file. This is our notes icon and you can see in Inkscape there's the icon grid but then in app icon preview you see nothing because the app icon grid is ignored. Let's zoom out a bit and this is basically the structure of the template so in the middle you have the grid for the high color and the symbolic these are the areas where we're going to draw the icon and then on the left there's some example icons for the high color and sometimes it's good to like take inspiration from use pieces off these are like specifically chosen to be like archetypal things like a book and the stack of pages and so on and then on the right side we have a bunch of example symbolics to give you a basic idea of the style. Let's have a quick look at the layer setup so we're drawing everything on icons and then grid and base plate are the ones that show the grid around like where the icon is but they're being hidden in the preview so you don't necessarily need to do anything there but you can hide them if you want. Okay let's start drawing so my plan is to copy this logs icon delete all the stuff we don't want and then transform it into a notes icon so I've copied the logs icon and now I'm just aligning it to the grid on the actual canvas and now let's delete everything on top of this paper stack because we don't need it. All right and now we have a great stack of paper that we can use as the basis for our icon let's check it out in preview looks pretty good let's continue and next we want to make our paper stack yellow because that's the color of notes it looks like our paper stack here doesn't already have the corner highlight gradient thing so I'm gonna do that by hand but maybe that's good to show actually I'm adding a horizontal gradient on the bottom part of the object here and I'm moving it below everything so you can see it a little better and basically now we need to add two stops on each side one for the light and one for the dark color I know I'm not being super efficient here but yeah you get the idea and now that we have all the stops we can basically just use the colors from the palette at the bottom okay so the whole thing is yellow now let's check it out in the preview and yeah this already looks like a notes related thing we just need to add some detail for this simple example my idea is to just add a few lines of text and then a pencil and call it a day so for the text lines I'm just drawing a few rectangles but one important thing here is to put them on the larger grid lines because that way they're also gonna be sharp at 32 and as you can see here they do look sharp at 32 cool so now we can just add a pencil so for the pencil we're gonna draw a triangle and a rectangle and then later on we can rotate it but we're just gonna draw it horizontally okay that's the tip of the pencil and now the handle okay so that's our very basic pencil and now we can rotate it here again it's good to place the bottom left corner on the larger pixel grid because that way it will be sharp okay not too bad let's maybe add another line of text okay let's keep that for now and move to the symbolic so with the symbolic the basic idea is that we are gonna draw a smaller version of the large icons obviously to the extent that's possible within 16 pixels and generally we try to do two pixel strokes at least for the most important things we try to stay one pixel away from the borders all around so in this case I'm just drawing a rectangle with a two pixel border all around and that's gonna be the outline of our icon and now we can add a very stylized pencil to it all right and this more or less already looks like a symbolic icon oh okay and it's not rendering correctly because the outline needs to be converted to an actual path and there we go this is more or less the process of drawing an icon from start to finish obviously if this were a real icon we would do a lot more iteration we'd put maybe more detail on some of the things like the pencil and so on but I think you have a basic idea of the kind of workflow with icon preview and kind of like going back and forth which is what I was really trying to do here so that concludes the part about app icons now let's talk about UI icons this part is going to be a lot shorter than the previous one primarily because a lot of this work is still in flux but I think it's important to include here as part of the longer-term vision that we have for icons to give a little bit of background the way icons and apps work in GNOME is that we have a set of symbolic icons in the system icon theme which all have tango style semantic names so system search is the loop and list add as a plus and so on and all of these icons can be used in apps via their name and you can also ship custom icons with your app by including an SVG in your repository and then like including it via g-resource and so on but that's quite a bit more work than just like using them via a string so developers tend to avoid that when they can and only use the built-in icons and that's been quite problematic in practice for a number of reasons so for example we found that a lot of developers don't use the icons necessarily by their semantic name but just because of what they look like and then you get cases like document edit looks like a pencil but someone might use it as the pencil in their drawing app the problem is that the API for it is the semantic name and the actual metaphor what the icon looks like might change at any time and when that happens the app developer is going to be screwed because now the pencil icon is no longer a pencil and the other problem is that since it's so much easier to use icons via the name rather than include them in your app people constantly ask us for more super specific icons in the core set that maybe no other app is ever going to need and that just make the core set harder to maintain and increase the API surface of things that can change from under people at any time kind of in parallel to the whole app icon thing we also came up with a plan to fix the symbolic icon situation and the basic idea is that we would make it much easier to actually ship icons with your app both by improving the developer story and like having better documentation and also by giving people a large library of icons to actually include that are not part of the core icon set and at the same time we would slim down the core icon set to only the stuff the system actually needs and like the important shared patterns like the primary menu and so on that way we would both reduce the burden on the maintainers of the core icon set and also improve the situation for third-party developers because the icons that they're using are not changing from under them the first part of our solution here is our new library of non-semantic icons called the icon dev kit basically it's a large icon set of symbolic icons in the style of the regular gnomes symbolic icons but a lot of these are way more specific than things that we would include in the system icon set so like I don't know a park bench things like that and they're all named after what they look like rather than a semantic name but the real novelty here is that they aren't shipped to the system at all and you can only use them via g-resource these icons are included in a new app called icon library which allows you to search for icons and then guides you through including them in your app with this pretty neat interactive documentation thing that explains how to use g-resource and like you can choose your programming language and it kind of like gives you code snippets and so on but I'll give you a demo of that later this app was developed by Bilal Amusawi over the last summer along with a whole bunch of other really cool design tools all written in Rust so yeah kudos to him and on the authoring side we have another new tool which is basically the symbolic version of app icon preview and basically you can use that to preview the icons that you're drawing in Inkscape to see if they're like on the pixel grid if they recolor correctly and so on this functionality was originally in the same app that we use for previewing app icons but then eventually we split them because the use cases were a little bit more clear at that point and there are some things that we want to do in the future with symbolic icons such as preview like a whole large set of symbolics from a single file that wouldn't really have made sense in the same app as the icon stuff and now another demo this time of icon library so this is icon library as you can see it has a whole bunch of icons and organized in these non-semantic categories like body and food and so on and as you can also see a lot of these icons are very specific in a way to it we wouldn't allow in the main set so there are a lot of things here that maybe one or two apps need somewhere when maybe they need to customize it first and so it's good to have it and have it be available for apps but it's definitely not something that we would ever want to actually ship as part of the system icons you can also search and one of the cool things is that these icons can also be found via tags so those both semantic and non-semantic ones associated with every icon so as you can see here this thing has arrow, container, step, debugger and so on and down here we have the buttons for the two main use cases for symbolic icons which is to either use them in a mock-up or include them in an app and the app art is actually pretty interesting so let's have a look at that basically this view guides you through saving the file to your project directory and then including it in your g-resource file and then if you don't have a g-resource file there's code snippets for a whole bunch of programming language for like how to actually include that and basically it covers the entire range of things you need to do to actually get the icon shipped with your app so if all of this has gotten you interested in starting to draw some icons yourself here's how you can get started so the first link is the icon page on the GNOME human interface guidelines that's got like the basic rules and sort of ideas behind all of this and then below there's a tutorial that I wrote about basically designing a GNOME app icon from scratch and there's a lot of kind of nitty gritty stuff in there that you might be interested in of course you should try all of our cool new design tools most of which are written in Rust which here makes them very hip these days and yeah you can get them on FlatHub a little bit about our future plans for this whole initiative so as I said earlier we're gonna just keep iterating on the app icons but all the really exciting stuff right now is on the tooling side so for example app icon preview just got rewritten in Rust as of last week and as a result we got some really nice workflow improvements like for example the grid is now being hidden automatically in the preview whether or not it's hidden in the actual SVG and we also got SVG optimization that means smaller files and then the more medium term we also have some cool improvements planned for the export workflow in app icon preview but I think other than that we're pretty happy with that up on the symbolic side some of what we want is kind of blocked by technical limitations in how symbolics are handled but in the medium term one of the things that we really want is for symbolic preview to export all the individual icons from a set so basically you if you have an app that has a lot of symbolics you can easily manage them from a single file and then export them to production using symbolic preview so before we close I just want to take a moment and summarize some of the main ideas here a lot of our icon infrastructure on the free desktop is built around the assumption that it's possible to have this centrally managed set of icons that all the apps in the system share with every possible icon an app might need and every icon has 10 different sizes that are all pixel hindered for every possible scenario and unfortunately this only works if you have a handful of apps and no significant ecosystem of third-party apps a lot of the work that GNOME has been doing over the last decade or so with things like Flatback and GNOME Builder and so on was focused around exactly that like creating a real app ecosystem of third-party apps and so I think it makes sense to apply that same lens to icons as well because just like the only scalable way to do application packaging is to decentralize it, have the app developers do it the only scalable way to do icons is also decentralized where the apps own their icons as much as possible and when we design our icon system that should be the first priority that everything else kind of follows from so for example pixel hinting is nice but with today's hardware it matters less and less and as we said earlier a lot of those sizes are never used so in terms of trade-offs it's definitely less important than empowering developers so we can do it where it makes sense but it's not at any cost and that's really the thought I'd like to leave you with if we want free software to be competitive we really need to invest in solutions at scale and sometimes that means questioning and maybe revising some of the best practices that we've had for a long time a few people I'd like to thank obviously Jakob, Lapo and Sam from the GNOME design team it's been an honor and a pleasure working with all of you on this and obviously also the developers making all of the cool tooling happen so that's especially Xander, Blal and Julian thanks guys thank you very much for virtually attending my talk I hope you enjoyed it despite the bad audio this was all a little bit of a last-minute effort and if you have any questions feel free to reach out by email or message on okay so I'm looking at questions any questions thanks for the presentation you're welcome there were some questions before I think well so I can repeat the one from before that I remember and already answered on IRC which was like where is the color palette so there's a color palette app that you can use to get it there's also a git repository on the GNOME GitLab that has the templates for the icons I think also like some templates for drawing on paper and also includes the color palette and I'm not sure what the best way to just tribute a link to that is right now I've put it in IRC before but I mean all of that is pretty easy to find like if you go to the gig you'll find your way there is there a plan to use the palette inside of apps 2 for example in calendar for the colors that people can use for the calendars so there's been like an ongoing effort to use similar colors to these like maybe not exactly the same ones like the idea with this color palette was not to like have these exact shades of every color be the ones we use everywhere because like in practice the use cases are all like a little bit different and you often just want something that feels the same rather than like being exactly that shade I think there's like work on a new color palette for like terminal and builder and stuff so that's happening I know like well I mean the the GTK style sheet was already adapted to that like a year ago I don't know about calendar but probably just a matter of opening an issue any other questions I can scroll up and see if there was something else oh yeah there were some questions before about like whether this is like native or electronic or whatever and yes this is all native GTK no web stuff anywhere question am I a full-time designer yes I'm a full-time designer at Pearson you're welcome any other questions okay so there's another question for someone who is really not a designer at all where can I reach an icon designer for third-party pre-soft perhaps so in general like any of the places where like GNOME design people hang out like on IRC like the usual sort of GNOME hackers GNOME design and so on it's probably a good place um I've been doing a fair number of like things where it's just like if your app is on FlatHub and it's like a modern GTK 3 app it's possible that I will find you so there is that route generally I'm just like sort of going around that if I see a good GTK 3 app that's on FlatHub I try to help out I have a long list of things that I still want to get through but I'm doing a few a month or something so it's it's going but yeah generally like GNOME IRC or like if you want you can also reach out to me personally and some of the places that I put on the slides and then there's another question what are your suggestions for multi-platform applications for icon design how can they avoid being odd man so I mean this this is very difficult because like all of the platforms keep changing all the time and like form factors keep changing all the time and trends keep changing all the time and I think that's part of why especially like on mobile where a lot of companies sort of that's that's their main like touchpoint to their users so basically just like use your logo and put it on a white background and that's icon design now which from an icon designer point of view not great that's one way to do it you basically just like sort of the smallest common denominator depending on like what your sort of brand I don't know like needs are in some cases there's maybe the option to like just redraw your icon like in a similar way for every platform but obviously that's a lot more work and there's the potential for people to like not get it's the same thing and so it's really difficult I think is the answer but it also depends on which platforms you're targeting like if you're going for mobile and desktop that makes everything even harder so yeah I don't know do you have any more sort of specific follow-ups does that answer your question does another one does your open source design work help you in your career to get jobs well I mean it is my job so yes and there's another one do you know if other OS distributions UI toolkits have similar icon resizing workflows or such strict guidelines especially in the open source world I'm not sure what you mean similar to what similar to the old tango thing or the new thing we're doing now or what exactly that issues for inkscape oh boy that's maybe a topic for for more sort of more high bandwidth kind of conversation wait in terms of complexity as far as I know this is the simplest and most streamlined icon like set of icon guidelines that is out there on any platform because like I don't know even the mobile platforms require like six different sizes and like random pngs that you need to render at different resolutions so I remembered like doing that a few years back there was not fun so this is a lot more fun to draw from both like a workflow and a tooling perspective was there anything else are there any plans to have icon design specification free desktop.org space specifications in what way like what we're doing here is still part of those specifications it's not really like outside that we're just basically using it a slightly different way basically like instead of sort of having six different sizes we draw one but like it's scalable it's all with SVG and then we draw it in such a way that it's going to be sharp rather than like redrawing it at a bunch of different sizes and it's a trade-off but like it's it's it's part of that same world or similar kind of time for cursors inkscapes custom cursors look very different from the advaita ones I don't know I've not done anything on cursors that's a question for Jacob I guess but in inkscape case it's probably just a question for inkscape developers because like it's the the GNOME cursors at least like it's all one SVG file I think you could just like add a bunch there and apps could hook into it or something or like apps use that style to draw their own app I don't know not really my department um okay the e has a kind of app I can preview I don't know what else uh someone asks if I would suggest the same one size plus symbolic approach in other desktop environments I mean it really depends like if if another desktop environment presents all their icons at 24 then maybe not but on the other hand like I don't know like I think it the whole sort of like pixel hinting approach it just generally feels old even like when it's even when it works if that makes sense because you get this like cartoony thick outlines and then like I remember we used to get bugs in GNOME when like um because like the the dash on the left side and the overview scales down as you add more icons and at the point where like I can sort of shift from one resolution to the lower one um they would get the thick strokes and people would file bugs where like my icon looks weird uh all of a sudden um and I think like there I don't know maybe I would suggest it to others too like even if they don't use our sizes like I don't it looks fine in practice uh it it really I don't know like I think I went into this with a lot of hesitation about that that kind of pixel hinting thing and like a month into it you never notice it again so that's that's been our experience but again like we we do have sort of the luxury of knowing what sizes we use stuff at and like being careful with that Q&A how do we attract non techie contributors how do you make them feel welcome in the community or maybe uh you have too many non techie ones anyways so you're not looking for them I mean we're almost looking for new contributors in every area um I'm not particularly involved with engagement that's like a question for a different uh kind of part of the GNOME community I mean yeah I don't know like generally we try to make everyone feel welcome sort of like answer questions be available on IRC or or matrix or like wherever people are but um yeah I mean there are people who like explicitly do this in the project and that's that's not me um so they could probably answer that question better uh Q&A do you use non open source apps in your workflow um well we sometimes use like blue jeans for calls if that counts because like someone has it from their work and for a lot of people it it sort of scales a little better than stuff like kidsy but other than that not that I know of I mean basically my workflow is like inkscape and like various things around inkscape so it's it's relatively simple in that regard Q&A follow up under the free desktop question can there be cross desktop environment icon specification under free desktop organization well I mean that is what free desktop is um like I don't know I'm not sure I understand can there be free desktop environment icon specification under free desktop organization I mean as far as I understand free desktop is not actually an organization even like it's more sort of a loose collective of people like whenever someone's interested in something they kind of like do it there as an umbrella thing but um yeah I don't think it's like sort of you know there's sort of a standards organization there per se it's it's a bit more ad hoc than that uh someone asks like I guess with blue jeans is that's just like basically jitsy but um yeah like basically it does everything in one video stream rather than a whole bunch so it's like slightly better for shitty connections but I mean that's what I'm saying if that's not free software anyway I'm not trying to advertise for like that here I maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it at all but it's like the only semi proprietary thing I like interact with from a work point of view any other questions current design trends I don't like I mean like the icon thing that I briefly touched upon earlier like where everything is now like a small icon on a white background on a lot of platforms I don't particularly like it would be nice if like because one of the things that we really care about with with the icon stuff um is keeping kind of like unique shapes for every icon and actually like using that canvas and on mobile and like or just generally other platforms they've kind of like moved the other way where like now everything sort of has like canvas around it and then inside that you like draw your actual icon which is a neat trick to control the background but I don't know I don't like how it basically just makes everything smaller for a good reason and if there's no other questions I think that concludes this all right yeah thanks everyone for joining I hope the my answers were useful and yeah if you want to reach out I'm available on the internet um and yeah I hope you're gonna use the stuff to make great app items thanks everyone bye