Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 213259
mail icons in evolution lack clarity
Last modified: 2013-04-02 00:21:21 EDT
First, let me say I know icons/art work are very subjective. I'm not criticizing the style, etc. That being said, the icons in evolution are hard for me to distinguish. The general envelope icon that is the basis for the other icons being white in the middle and dark along the edges makes it difficult to distinguish the arrows, etc that are put on top of it. At the small sizes that evolution uses, it's hard to see the details of each icon. Maybe if those arrows were a little bigger, it would help. For example, in Tango, the envelope base icon is whiter and the details are larger. Perhaps making the detail parts of the icons a bit larger would help with the clarity. I'm running on a Dell 2000FP 1600x1200 LCD monitor.
-> dfong
Just to confirm - I was about to file a BZ report for this before I found out that Thomas already did it :) I'm not an artist, therfore, my only suggestion is to make the icons for read/unread messages more distinguishable - currently when quickly skimming through large amount of e-mails it's hard to spot those that were unread just by looking at the icon. I also agree that the envelope's edges should be sharper because right now (remote desktop via FreeNX which uses image compression) they look more like shaded gray boxes rather than envelopes.
Thank you both for the extremely constructive feedbacks. I will be making these modifications next week.
Can I additionally propose to change the "read" icon to have an open flap that makes the icons distingishable by their outline already ?
Created attachment 149835 [details] screenshot with original mail icons Providing a screenshot with original mail icons to compare.
Created attachment 149836 [details] with modified mail icons Take a look and let me know if additional modifications are needed. I can also attach the individual icons for you to test, let me know.
I find the new style much more clear. The base envelop icon and the enlarged emblems on top of it are much easier to distinguish. I'm curious if the expanded color pallet is going to be used throughout echo? (The purple arrows and yellow star are what I notice immediately.) I'm not sure you need to change the color of the arrows to provide enough clarity for my initial problem. That being said, the purple and yellow do make the representative icons stand out more. If the expanded pallet is going to be incorporated into the rest of echo then I'd keep the purple and yellow but if not, they seem to me to maybe stand out a little too much. Once again I remind you that I'm not criticizing nor am I a graphic artist so don't put too much in my single opinion.
Thanks for the quick response. The purple arrows have not been used elsewhere, however, I believe the different color arrow for reply adds another level of clarity, especially for the smaller icons when the shape might not be easily distinguishable. As for the star, there has been some discussion about it, being a more visible color and whatnot...so it's been adopted and will be modified for existing icons later.
Just noticed the added color for the compose icons in evolution. Looks good and goes well with the purple and yellow. So how soon do these hit rawhide?
User dfong@redhat.com's account has been closed
The new icons are in rawhide for a while now.