GNOME Is Making Great Progress On Overhauling Their App Icons

In addition to the many big ticket changes being worked on for GNOME 3.32 like better performance and Wayland improvements, it also marks the project embarking on a big overhaul of their application icons.

The GNOME developers and designers have been working to overhaul their app icons and the new guidelines and improvements will begin taking shape with GNOME 3.32.0, due out now in less than two months. GNOME contributor Jakub Steiner of Red Hat who was also involved in the original Tango icon guidelines has been working on this visual design overhaul for GNOME's icons.

The focus of this app icon overhaul is "making good icons more attainable for more apps." It's also about modernizing the icons so they more akin to the likes of other platforms where they are more simple and flat these days rather than being very detailed as was popular in the past.

The new GNOME app icon guidelines comes with a grid, recommended base shapes, and a new color palette. Rather than forcing developers to spin up to seven different icons for different size requirements of the former guidelines, the new process requires just a full color icon and a monochrome symbolic icon. The color icon is now optimized for 64px size, including support for shipping as an SVG.

GNOME also has a new "Icon Preview" application to get started with their icon design workflow, preview it in different contexts, and export as SVG. With the new guidelines, shadows to icons would be applied automatically so the icons can be automatically adapted for the GNOME desktop night mode and similar handling.

Those wanting to see some of the new icons being worked on and more background information on their decisions around these new GNOME icon guidelines, stop by Jakub's blog for a very interesting look at what's ahead.