I really like the Tango Desktop project. I have in fact installed a “preliminary” release from art.gnome.org, which is easy when using the Gnome Art package.

One thing that makes Tango stick out, is its styleguide. I also really appreciate it’s color palette. However, this palette is rather tied to a particular look - e.g. a white background.

I was wondering whether one can (with reasonable effort) design icons with a flexible palette. And then have a tool to “instanciate” the icons for a particular, probably different palette. So people in a dark mood could easily generate a “dark tango” version out of them.

You can’t really do that by just doing a palette replacement. However, if colors were specified as “50% orange, 50% background” it would work out. Or even “50% primary highlight color, 50% background”, then people could pick their favourite highlight color.

If an icon is meant to depict e.g. earth, you probably will want to use “green” and “blue”, and not highlight colors however; these should not be mapped then, either. Such icons might need a “halo” to look good with certain color schemes however.

I am not an icon designer, this is just my $.02, and I really appreciate the tango project. But maybe we could think of an icon designer application which makes such things easier to do. I havn’t designed icons since my Atari ST time, but I can imagine there is a lot of special tools you might want for icon designing, such as “resolution grid snapping” points and lines, line widths which snap to pixels and such. Think of “hinting” in fonts, but applied to icons. (Or maybe not - if you want to scale icons very small, you likely need to simplify them anyway - i.e. make a separate icon for small sizes)

Oh, and of course this might be utopic and overkill.

My top (tango) icon wishlist: LyX (because the icon is ugly) and Enigma (because I maintain the Debian package, and the current icon is somewhat boring, just a black ball… looks okay, though, on white background)