Comment 9 for bug 73023

I think Karoliina made a good point. Yes, usability and style are often not related. The original point of the bug is that current emblems are stylish but not usable (or not so much usable). That's why I suggested that we can improve usability even by returning old Gnome icons. But sure we all would prefer emblems to be both stylish and usable!

Now from comments I understood that the main idea of nysosym is to make emblems share some unified look to deliver the notion that they are emblems and are from the same pool. I'd like to make some comments on this.

- (this one is a speculation, I never really tested it) I think that emblems are viewed as emblems mainly not by their look but by their role: every picture that hangs next to a main icon is an emblem. But I agree that unified look is not a bad thing by itself.

- The unified look can nonetheless be broken by user's custom emblems which you can see on my "orange" screenshot in the upper right corner, I used two project's icons for project folders. This was the thing that always looked ugly in many alternative shells for Windows: they come with some beautiful set of icons, but as soon as a user wants a custom icon it stands out and looks ugly (not all users can draw).

- Even if we really want to stick to a unified look we can make the 'unified' part less overwhelming. Imagine a set of colorful and differently shaped icons that all have some _little_ common detail. Let it be the orange circle but let it be small enough to not eat the shape but big enough to be recognizable. I even try to make some prototype though my drawing skills are low :-)