unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jason Smith <jason.smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There are unfortunate limitations on icon sizing in Linux. We are stuck
with 24px, 32px, 48px, and 64px icons. We can interpolate in between,
however this will make it fuzzy. Further 32x32 is not a good option
since a lot of applications only ship a 24, 48, 64 set of icons.
Further, svg's while scalable, do not scale all that well either. What
are designed to be 1px lines end up being fractions of pixels, making
them fuzzy as well.

For the compiz version of Unity it was then decided to use 48x48 icons,
with a 2 pixel border in the tile. This represents a growth in tile size
from mavericks 48x48 to Natty's 52x52. The icons do *look* a lot bigger
though because the icon fills a lot more of the tile now. In reality
however, the icons are only 8% bigger. Some of this loss can be made up
for by a smaller padding on each side of the launcher.

If you look at the launcher in Maverick you will see the icons are
fuzzy. Be warned though, once you notice this, you can never un-notice!

To be truly scalable, Icon authors need to make svg's, and svg needs a
way to denote a line has a fix pixel size. Until this is both possible
and completed, we are stuck in the world of fixed icon sizes... or
shipping lots of icons.

On Sun, 2010-12-05 at 20:33 -0300, Martín A. Casco wrote:
> Even on big screens they are to big and currently we can't change
> their size...
> 
> I think that the ability to change their size it's necessary.. don't
> you? 
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-- 
Jason Smith | Desktop Experience Team
GNOME Developer
Canonical USA Inc.
T. +1.248.756.6266 | jason.smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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