373452 - Fine-Tuning of the new Mail/News icons

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Manuel Reimer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-AT; rv:1.8.0.10) Gecko/20070306 SeaMonkey/1.0.8
Build Identifier: Any Trunk Build ID

As the Mail/News icons are finished now, I'm opening this bug now. Please add anything you want to be improved to this bug. If you add short screenshots, this would help pretty much, bug you may also add just some well-explained ideas as comments and I'll do the icons as soon as I find the required time.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Manuel Reimer]

Copying the comment from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348720#c64

Eyal Rozenberg   2007-03-10 05:51:16 PST

Created an attachment (id=258107) [details]
illustration of icon illegibility

(In reply to comment #62)

I don't want to get acrimonious, my criticism is certainly not personal and
having done a (very small) bit of icon design myself, I know very well this is
not at all an easy task.

Still, Manuel, I really think you shouldn't dismiss criticism the way you do.
Most of us do this on our spare time (I know I do). SeaMonkey can have a
relaxed release cycle anyway, and very few people use it for the beauty of the
icons, so I don't see why we should be hasty in accepting a new icon theme;
this is doubly the case considering the fact that the new theme is very similar
to the Modern theme, which people can use instead of the old Classic if they
want to. I would even go as far as saying that a new theme can wait until
someone who is a (semi-)professional artist can redo it, the way the new
Seamonkey logo was chosen.

Now about this attachment. You'll see on the top the new checked-in icons for
the classic theme. The differences between the attachment and no-attachment are
quite minimal. Below them you see the old message-mail.gif and
message-mail-attach.gif  ; since these are high-contrast icons, the difference
stands out more clearly. If we wish to use the envelope shape in the first
line, the _least_ we can do is make the paperclip more pronounced, like I've
done in the third line.

I want to emphasize that this is an illustration of the general issue, it's not
just one icon that's problematic. The whole icon set is quite illegible. The
way things stand, I don't think the new icon set is ready to replace the old
Classic theme icon set. That's why I'm not opening a new bug.

Comment 2

[Manuel Reimer]

If you really think the new icon set isn't ready, then please explain more precisely *what* should be done to make it ready. There will be no major changes like "throw anything away and do something new" but improvements are always nice!

BTW: And we *won't* go back to the old icons! Classic definetly can't be the default theme for SeaMonkey 1.5! It just makes SeaMonkey look like an application developend 1994 or even earlier!

Comment 3

[Andy Boze]

Attachment: Alternative mail attachment icon

Largely I don't have a problem with the new mail icons, but the attachment icon (envelope + paperclip) I find very difficult to distinguish from the plain envelope icon. I have my screen resolutions set as high as they will go, so the icons are quite small. Perhaps something like this might work.

Comment 4

[ttucker]

On the whole, I think I like the new icons, but I'll concur on the message w/ attachment icon being a bit hard to distinguish.

In particular, it's almost impossible to tell whether or not a message has an attachment when the message is selected.  (the darker highlighting for the row obscures any sign of the difference in icons)

Comment 5

[mv_van_rantwijk]

I don't like the new mail icons, and for good reason.  Why re-invent the wheel?  Why not just use the default Thunderbird icons for mail?  Why did you make classic look like a modern mock up?  What about adding a little more color?  Am I blind or is it just plain difficult to differentiate between read and unread items?  What about attachments and that spam icon?  There is nothing telling me what it is.

Note: Eyal Rozenberg is right because these icons SUCK.

> BTW: And we *won't* go back to the old icons! Classic definetly can't be the 
> default theme for SeaMonkey 1.5! It just makes SeaMonkey look like an
> application developend 1994 or even earlier!

Well, neither can this theme.  It might be an improvement, somewhat, but many of us will be looking for a new theme anyway, just to escape this 1999 look and feel...