random icons are colorful while some other notification-area icons are dark

The same with tomboy notes.

Guys , changing the icons in the panels *will* affect the system as a whole , these icons will be used even in apps, that would mess up the appearance...

For this to work properly , the UNR-dust theme needs to be modified to use the icon only for the panel and not else where...

Daniel has done an app specific theme , you might have to modify Dust similar to that.

@mac_v: I don't understand your remark? UNR uses the humanity icon theme and ships U1-client by default; these two should play nice together. Currently they don't since the icon colours don't match. I would love getting nice icons in humanity for U1-client but can only proceed to dropping humanity instead.

@ Loïc Minier:
Hmm... my comment wasnt just about this icon :) sorry i wasnt clear. The Ubuntu one icon is in progress :)

But bugs were popping up requesting for these greyscale icons ... and the icons look good on the panel , but these same icons are used in the apps,

for instance , when you check the sound prefs it uses the same greyscale icons ...

IMO , it would be better if there is a little tweak in the Dust theme as well for this , so that only the panel uses these icons , while the apps use the color icons...

check out Daniel's > bzr branch lp:egtk

I'm afraid it's too late for changes like these in Karmic so I'll ask for a FFE and move back to Human icon theme this cycle. I'd love to switch back to Humanity in karmic+1 with a full cycle to get things settled.

Loïc Minier :
I think you have taken my comment out of context :(
I was merely suggesting an improvement... and not about the choice of the default icon theme!

Also , Humanity had a full set of the color icons ,you could just request the return of the color icons than requesting for the FFE.
And these greyscale icons were done due to the request from the Canonical UX team.
Daniel has spent several days getting this concept out and it would be a shame not to use them.

The design team did *not* want any app specific icons made [eg: Tomboy , Rhythmbox] not even in color .... And UbuntuOne seems to fall into this category.

I believe they wanted only the system icons , battery/network/volume/Indicator-applet/indicator-session in greyscale .

We might need to get the design team to chime in on this.

IMO , restricting the greyscale icons only to the system icons , makes sense.
 It differentiates the system icons from the app icons.
Also, we could not possibly cover every app and make a greyscale icon. And the branding of these apps will be lost in the default setup,which is not ideal.

Even the human theme does *not* include icons for specific apps.

Even in other OS , only the system icons will be consistent and have the same style, while the app specific icons are not tampered with.

Or the Notification area could be tweaked to not use color.
 is it possible to desaturate color icons in the notification area? [Similar to the inactive window icons in UNR ]

This would ensure none of the apps *ever* have color.
This would be a better solution , since we cannot include app specific icons in the default theme and cannot insist all the various apps to make icons in greyscale.

I guess we could desaturate/remove colours of all icons displayed in the notification area too indeed; will bring up the two proposed solutions with DUX team

We only need to make sure that the error icons dont get desaturated too , instead they are allowed to display the red color.

DUX team will comment on recommended resolution for this bug tomorrow.

Closing as we want to keep Humanity

Waiting for UX team to comment on whether they want it like now, or all icons black and white (runtime desaturated) or all icons with colours (changing humanity icons to be of the coloured flavour)

If it is agreed that system icons (sound, network manager, etc.) are to be grayscale, please do not forget the bluetooth one (the blue one which appears when you have a bluetooth device connected)

Bummer. The greyscale icons in the notification area are not only very ugly compared to their nice full color counterparts (like the bluetooth icon) they are, more importantly, very hard to see and hence represent a serious degradation in UI functionality.

So I chatted about this bug with Ivanka who told me that:
- we would keep the mix of greyscale and non-greyscale icons this cycle and the next one
- apps using notification area icons are welcome to integrate with the Ubuntu theme by providing greyscale icons, or can keep coloured icons, or even make it configurable like dropbox on OSX

She might consider updating our current icons with slightly updated ones, for instance slightly different level of grey, and told me she would check out what's in lp:humanity's bzr.

mac_v (Humanity upstream) told me there are updated Humanity icons in bzr along with a new icon theme derived from Humanity and made specially for UNR; I don't intend to update Humanity stuff in karmic anymore unless I hear otherwise from design team.

We have also setup the theme for dark panels , with has only the lighter version of panel icons > lp:humanitydark

If the humanity icons for the notifications area (dark and light) are available then we should ship them if at all possible.

Thanks Loic for relaying our conversation - I am sorry I didn't get round to commenting myself. Apologies.

The current humanity theme has been changed to work well with a light ui theme. This package should be updated for Karmic.

In addition, there is now a Humanity-Dark theme which has icons made for a dark theme. UNR should use this theme on top of Humanity (ie the system sets the theme to Humanity-Dark and it should inherit Humanity.)

I will sync with pitti and release team post beta to see if we can do this

Note that the Humanity-Dark icons are only 30K compressed (42K if you use gzip instead of bzip2) and 824K uncompressed. It isn't a whole new theme, just an extension of the Humanity theme.

desktop-switcher doesn't currently set the icon_theme; only gtk_theme. It should set icon_theme to Humanity-Dark/Humanity when in netbook/classic mode, respectively.

So we might drop desktop-switcher entirely, see bug #443298.

After discussion with Loïc, I've agreed to allow this into karmic even though these changes are *well* past the freeze deadlines and include changes unrelated to the bug being addressed here. He assures me that this is a significant net improvement over what we have currently, even though there's some risk of regressions still, and I accept his recommendation. FFe, UIFe granted.

Overall, I'm unhappy with how this bug has played out. The artwork freeze exists for good reason; themes are not merely aesthetic, they need to be QAed as an integral part of the desktop, and late changes to the themes also leave the docs team little time to prepare documentation for inclusion in the release. In the future, I expect icon themes to respect the freeze schedule to not negatively impact other aspects of the release preparation, and further updates to the humanity-icon-theme package in karmic need to be strictly bugfix-only.

This bug was fixed in the package humanity-icon-theme - 0.4.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
humanity-icon-theme (0.4.1-0ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low

  * New upstream release
    - Adds a Humanity-Dark theme and uses darker grey levels for Humanity;
      LP: #436485.
    - Use greyscale icons for everything system related; LP: #430277.
    - Update watch file to use "Humanity" instead of "humanity".
    - Update description to mention Humanity-Dark.
    - Update install file to install Humanity-Dark.
    - Update icon-naming-utils calls to cover both themes.
    - Adds monochrome icon for bluetooth; LP: #437162.
  * Cherry pick fixes from lp:humanity/Humanity{,-Dark}/index.theme@r393,
    fixing various typos spotted during review with a script to generate the
    index instead of updating it manually.
  * Cherry pick new greyscales icons for disabled bluetooth from
    lp:Humanity{,-Dark}/status/24/bluetooth-disabled.svg@r394; LP: #442867.
  * Cherry pick updates to zoom icons, copied from
    lp:humanity/Humanity/actions/*/zoom-*.svg@r395.

 -- Loic Minier <email address hidden> Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:28:22 +0200

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-netbook-remix-default-settings - 0.6.5

---------------
ubuntu-netbook-remix-default-settings (0.6.5) karmic; urgency=low

  * Use Humanity-Dark as the default icon-theme and add a Breaks on
    humanity-icon-theme << 0.4.1~; LP: #430277.
  * Bump up Standards-Version to 3.8.3; no change needed.
  * Use dh_prep instead of dh_clean -k.
  * Fix racy dependency of install target on build, move it to install-stamp.
  * Add a .PHONY for non-stamp targets; NB: no pattern rule ('%') is used.
  * Add Software Center to default netbook-launcher Favourites; LP: #443303.

 -- Loic Minier <email address hidden> Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:14:12 +0200

given that bug 443311 and bug 443333 were now made duplicates of this bug (both were results of testing loics ppa package and filed separately on his request) i'd like to mention that neither of them is fixed with this upload.
display-properties as well as vino are shipped by default and both use notification area icons, neither of them is covered by the fixed humanity-icon-theme, both of them show up in desktop as well as UNR ...

if you consider them covered by the humanity-icon-theme fix that closed this bug, this bug needs to be left open since they are definately not fixed with the upload.
if you consider them separate apps that shouldnt be covered by humanity-icon-theme, their bugs should not be duplicates of this one and be handled separately ...

please dont hide bugs through marking them as duplicates of a fix that doesnt fix them.

Oliver Grawert , Kindly read all the comments on this bug report. esp > comments #20

We will *not* be providing separate icons for apps which are not configured to use the notification area by default.

Since this will break apps , as these icons will be used in the app windows too.
So we are restricting the greyscale icons *only* to the default system icons are configured in the default setup.

If these icons are to be added it would need to be done only after proper patches for the apps.
So in principle they are dups of this bug , unless you'd also file the bugs in the concerned apps to get this icon problems resolved... all other apps requesting for greyscale icons are dups of this Master bug.

If the apps provide the greyscale icons from their side, this solves the issue ,but it is an app specific bug. and not a bug in humanity

so how is anyone supposed to know there is a bug in the app if you just close them all through making them duplicates of this one instead of properly tiraging them and assigning them to the app ... instead of closing them ?
that way they will never be fixed.

Oliver Grawert, the bugs have been unduped, Kindly add the appropriate package affected.

I added an upstream task for adding icon_theme transitions in desktop-switcher; if it's implemented, nice, otherwise we wont get it in karmic. Not a big deal since we dropped desktop-switcher.

un-milestoning the desktop-switcher task for this since it is wontfix for karmic

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but how is this "Fix Released" for humanity-icon-theme? At best, it should be "Won't Fix". The tray icons are still a mix of good-looking color icons from various apps and the washed out grey-scale icons for system things. I can understand using grey-scale for UNR, since the environment is much more controlled, but the default installs of Ubuntu should continue to use Human -- this seems to be a rather extreme regression in the look/feel integration of the Ubuntu desktop.

@Kees Cook :
Released as per comment 20# .
The decision is to do the icons only for system icons and the rest of the icons need to be provided by the apps themselves.

Regarding the regression ;) copy-pasting the comment from the dup:
This was a design decision. The reasons where:
- The notification area icons a constant presence and the use of color draws undue attention to these icons.
- But rather , if the use of color [red] is restricted to only errors and warnings, when these icons gain color for the errors and warnings more attention is grabbed by these icons , which would lead the users to react more quickly.

Kees, I initially reported the grey icons as a bug in UNR (humanity was only used in UNR back then) but when the design team later decided that this is what we wanted to have in karmic for both UNR and the desktop, I transformed the bug into a humanity-icon-theme update bug to fix the remaining system icons which were colourful.

That is, my bug was a complaint that colours and non-colours icons were fixed; it was clarified that we want "system" related icons to be grey scales and the rest colourful, so the bug tracked the fact that not all system icons were grey scales.

I guess for clarity I should have opened a new bug instead.

I certainly understand the offered rationale for the decision to make the system icons greyscale, I just think the decision is painfully bad.

In addition to just being ugly, the loss of color significantly interferes with the usability of the desktop for me on a daily basis because it takes me longer to figure out what icon is which when I want to change a system setting. I do things like mute the audio, change to a different wireless network, and check my battery level far more often than I encounter errors or warnings in the system icon area. The loss of color makes all of those slower. If a warning or error is severe enough that a split-second faster response time is needed, a notification window should pop up rather than depending on a system icon to indicate such a critical error.

That said, I appreciate that Canonical is helping out the community by employing the blind in their design team. I just think it might be more useful to have them work on other aspects of the accessibility project than picking colors for the desktop.

This is fine when all greyscale icons load earlier than others. If not, some icons are colored between greyscale ones, which looks awkward.

@Allan Caeg :
Kindly open a separate bug instead. What you mention, cannot be covered in this bug.
This bug was initially started for the Humanity theme and the greyscale icons, [but got sidetracked a bit in the middle].

AFAIK , none of the icons *in the default install* , are a mix of color and greyscale as you'v described.

Here you go :) https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/430277

Wrong link! LOL. Here it is :)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/humanity-icon-theme/+bug/476170