LibreOffice Initial Icons - Milestone Number One

LibreOffice Design Team Effort

Hi all!

This post is - more or less - on behalf of the LibreOffice Design Team. Yesterday, we reached an important milestone considering the initial icons for the applications, the documents, and the templates. We now have final drafts for all six major LibreOffice applications.

As you may know from some older Design related posts, we've been working on the icons since about two weeks ... although we've started quite some time ago. And - to cite Bernhard - it seems that we kicked of a collaborative design effort we've never seen within OOo. And that just feels great. Plenty of feedback, and help - although we still need some more support (I'll explain that later.)

LibreOffice Icon Proposals

Let's have a look at the recent Calc icon proposal ...

If you had a look at previous versions, you might notice some changes - based on feedback we got. For example, the application/document icons (top row) now feature grayish background to convery the idea of "paper". Instead, the lower ones now feature more intensive "application colors".

But what are the main characteristics of these icons in general?

• Document symbolism that is unique among all the LibreOffice icons
• Different sizes that contain (hand-optimized) pixel perfect alignment and adapted symbolism details
• Versions for viewers with good eyesight, and versions for people with visual disabilities
• Based on the LibreOffice Branding Guidelines (here)

Okay, not avoid flooding you with too many details, let's compress the information and just highlight the 128px icons we've created so far ...

Progress and Next Steps 

Many icons are still missing, but the most important ones (a.k.a. visible for the user) are available. Now I'd say: "We will complete our mission!" :-) But ...

Help wanted!!! Sorry for shouting visually, but we currently lack a bit developer support to bring them into LibreOffice. Currently, the naming scheme, the packaging and the locations are unclear - so, developers, please join! Here is Bernhard's initial message.

The following table shows the current state of the icons - the most recent version can be found in the wiki.

By the way, the graphics within this blog post refer to the icons I have been working on. Of course, due to the incremental improvements, some contributors also offer slightly different / alternative versions - please refer to the table.

More Information

So what do you think? If you are interested in more information, then:

• Visit the LibreOffice Initial Icons wiki page
• Provide feedback on the Design Team Mailing List

Cheers,
Christoph