Re: [odf-adoption] Proposal: ODF Icons

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

Hi Louis,

The challenge here is that some vendors want their icons to harmonize with 
their application's visual design.  They want it to be an extension of 
their "look".  So the user sees the document icons in their folder, and 
that these resemble the icons for launching their editors, and these in 
turn resemble the splash screen and title border of their application.  So 
there is coordination of color scheme and other aspects of visual design 
across all of these.

So I'm not sure you'll get wide buy-in on "Removal of any product- or 
vendor-specific brand". 

Another approach would be a unifying thematic element that all icons could 
include in their own product-specific icons.  You see that, for example, 
with the little "PDF" box you see in the upper left of a PDF document

Of course, this is far outside my area of expertise, so I'd love to hear 
other views on this.

-Rob


Louis.Suarez-Potts@Sun.COM wrote on 12/08/2009 02:36:27 PM:

> Earlier this year, in September, I sent a version of the message 
> regarding a proposal for a Unified ODF Icon set. [0] Mary McRae and 
> Bart replied but besides those two, the proposal fell into that 
> familiar abyss. It's time to reawaken interest, for at the recent 
> OOoCon, in Orvieto, Italy, there was more discussion on the icons 
> and so I'm reintroducing them. I invite you to discuss the merits of
> this idea here.
> 
> There are several reasons for the new icons, and Lutz Hoeger spells 
> them out in his post to GullFoss [1] of 18 September 2009. These 
> reasons include:
> 
> * Clean and unique visual identity
> * Removal of any product- or vendor-specific brand
> * Recognition of the ODF format regardless of vendor
> 
> Put another way, the icons give recognizable form, colour, line to 
> the icons, so that users can see them and recognize them regardless 
> of the environment. The ODF universe is thus strengthened, and at a 
> time when more and more vendors are implementing the ODF, this is, I
> believe, quite important. It's especially so given our parallel 
> interest in ensuring that all implementations of the ODF work 
> smoothly together, which is to say, interoperable *because* of the 
> format identity. And this format identity is given visual identity 
> through these unified icons.
> 
> History: The decision to use these icons was reached at the 09 March
> 2009 Engineering Steering Committee (ESC) meeting, [2] and at first 
> the idea was to use them in OOo 3.2. It's no longer the case that 
> we'll introduce them then, but we will integrate them after that 
> release. We invite people to work on them with the developers and 
> designers operating out of the ODF Toolkit and they are at present 
> in the Toolkit's repository. [3] Why is work being done there? 
> Because these icons relate to the ODF, not to OpenOffice.org as 
> such. They are definitively vendor neutral: that is the point, to be
> recognizable *as* indicating ODF, not any one vendor.
> 
> Discussions relating to their work can take place on the Toolkit 
> lists, and to their merits, here, on this list, too. As well, there 
> is a project page on the OpenOffice.org wiki that further supplies 
> the motivation for their creation [4].
> 
> I invite you all to discuss the merits, logic, logistics of these 
> icons, and to take this post as a serious one to unify and 
> strengthen the visual identity of the ODF.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Louis
> 
> 
> ** Links
> 
> [0] 
> <http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/odf-adoption/email/
> archives/200909/msg00008.html>
> 
> [1] <http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/unified_odf_icons>;
> 
> [2] <http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/
> ESC_meeting_minutes_20090309#proposal_for_unified_ODF_Document_icons>; 
and, <
> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/ESC_minutes#Unified_ODF_Icons>;
> 
> [3] <http://odftoolkit.org/pages/ODF-Icons>;
> 
> [4] <http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Unified_ODF_Icons_-
> _Project_Home_Page>;
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Louis Suarez-Potts, PhD
> Community Manager, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
> OpenOffice.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
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