December 2019 – Space and Meaning

Designing an Icon for Your App

You’ve designed your app’s interface, and found the perfect name for it. But of course a great app also needs a great icon before you can release it to the world.

After the name, the app icon is the most important part of an app’s brand. The icon can help explain at a glance what the app does, and serves as an entry point to the rest of the experience. A high quality icon can make people want to use an app more, because it’s a stand-in for the quality of the entire app.

Think of the app icon like an album cover for your app. Yes, technically the music is the same even if you have a terrible cover, but a great cover can capture the spirit of the album and elevate the quality of the thing as a whole.

Metaphors

The first thing you need is a metaphor, i.e. some kind of physical object, symbol, or other visual artifact that symbolizes your application.

Finding a good metaphor is a fuzzy and sometimes difficult process, as it’s often hard to find a physical object many people will recognize as related to the domain of your app. There are no hard and fast rules for this, but ideally your icon metaphor should fall into one of these categories:

Physical objects directly related to what the app does (e.g. a speaker for Music)
Physical objects vaguely related to the app’s domain or an older analog version of it (e.g. a cassette tape for Podcasts)
Symbols related to the domain (e.g. the “play” triangle for Videos)
A simplified/stylized version of the app’s user interface (e.g. Peek)

There are also anti-patterns for metaphors which should be avoided, if possible:

Heavily stylized symbols or logos (e.g. Fondo)
Completely random objects or symbols (e.g. Dino)
Mascots (e.g. GIMP)

These kinds of metaphors can work, but they make it harder to see at a glance what the app does, and don’t fit in as well with the rest of the system.

Let’s try an example: Remember the Reading List app we designed in a previous tutorial? Let’s make an icon for that!

My process for brainstorming metaphors is quite similar to the one I use to brainstorm names: I come up with a few ideas for physical objects, put them in a thesaurus to find more related ones, and repeat that until I have a list with at least a few viable candidates.

Let’s start with related physical objects:

Reading List
List
Book
Bookshelf
Article
Newspaper
Bookmark

How about related non-objects? Maybe we can find some more interesting objects that way:

Reading, the activity: Couch, reading light, tea/coffee, glasses
Later (as in, “read later”): Clock, timer
Collecting things: Folder, clipboard

Now that we have a few options, let’s see which ones are viable. Ideally, the metaphor you choose should have these attributes:

Somewhat specific to the app’s domain (e.g. a book is probably too generic in our case)
Recognizable at small sizes
Can be drawn in a simple, geometric style (this can save you a lot of work later on)

In this case, the most viable options are probably

Stack of books
Bookshelf
Bookmark
One of the above + a clock

Sketches

Now that we have some metaphors, let’s try to sketch them to see if they make for good icons. I usually use pencil and paper for this, but you can also use a whiteboard, digital drawing tablet, or whatever else works for you to quickly visualize some concepts.

There are also official sketching templates with the base icon shapes available for download.

While sketching it’s good to think about the overall shape your icon will have. If it makes sense for your metaphor, try to make the icon not just a simple square or circle, but something more unique and interesting. If it doesn’t make sense in your case don’t force it though, there are other ways to make the icon visually unique and interesting, such as color and structure.

In this case, it looks like there are a number of viable concepts among our sketches, though nothing jumps out as the obvious best option. I kind of like the bookshelf, so let’s try going forward with that one.

Start from a Template

We now have a concept we like, so we can move to vector. This is where we can start using the shiny new icon design tools!

The first step is to install App Icon Preview from Flathub. We’ll also need a vector editor that works well with SVG, such as Inkscape.

Open App Icon Preview, and hit the “New App Icon” button on the welcome screen. We’re asked for the Reverse Domain Name Notation name of the app (e.g. org.mozilla.Firefox), and where to store the icon project file.

In most cases you’ll want to keep this file in your app’s git repository. Think of it as your icon’s source file, which the final icon assets are later exported from.

After that, the icon will open in preview mode in App Icon Preview. Now we open the same file in a vector drawing app, and edit it from there. Every time we save the source file, the preview will automatically update.

Now we have our icon source file open in both App Icon Preview and Inkscape. Icon Preview shows just the icon grid:

In Inkscape, open the Layers panel (Ctrl + Shift + L) and check out the layer structure. The icons layer is where the actual icon goes. The grid and baseplate layers contain the icon grid and the canvas respectively.

Behind everything else is the template layer, which doesn’t contain anything visible and is only needed so App Icon Preview can get the canvas size for preview and export. Don’t change, hide, rename, or delete this layer, because the icon might not show up in App Icon Preview anymore.

When previewing the icon in App Icon Preview you’ll want to hide the grid and baseplate layers (using the little eye icon next to the layers).

Make sure you have the GNOME HIG Colors palette in Inkscape. Inkscape 1.0 Beta has it by default, otherwise you can download it from the HIG App Icons repository and put it in ~/.var/app/org.inkscape.Inkscape/config/inkscape/palettes for Flatpak Inkscape or ~/.config/inkscape/palettes if it’s on the host. There’s also a color palette app, which you can get on Flathub.

Inkscape Tips

Once you’re familiar with the template, you can start drawing your icon idea as vector. If you’re using Inkscape and aren’t very familiar with the app yet, here’s a quick overview of the things you’ll likely need.

Toolbox (the toolbar on the left edge)

Selection/movement/scaling tool (S)
Rectangle tool (R)
Ellipse tool (E)

And if you’re doing something a little more advanced:

Bezier path drawing tool (B)
Path & node editor (N)
Gradient editor

Dialogs Sidebar (configuration dialogs docked to the right side)

Fill & Stroke (Ctrl + Shift + F)
Align & Distribute (Ctrl + Shift + A)
Layers (Ctrl + Shift + L)

Snap Controls (the toolbar on the right edge) Inkscape has very fine-grained snapping controls, where you can configure what should be snapped to when you move items on the canvas (e.g. path nodes, object center, path intersections). It’s a bit fiddly, but very useful for making sure things are aligned to the grid. The icon tooltips are your friends :)

Of course, teaching Inkscape is a bit out of scope for this guide. If you’re just getting started with it, I recommend doing a few beginner tutorials first to familiarize yourself with the basic workflows (especially around the tools listed here).

The GNOME Icon Style

Traditionally, GNOME app icons were very complex, with lots of photorealistic detail and many different sizes which had to be drawn separately. This changed when we revamped the style in 2018, with the explicit goal of making it easier to produce, and more approachable for third party icon designers.

The new style is very geometric, so in many cases you can draw an entire icon with just basic shapes.

These icons consist of rectangles (some with rounded corners) and circles exclusively

Perspective

One important attribute of the style is the abstract perspective. Even though the style is simple and geometric, it’s not “flat”: It makes use of material, depth, and perspective, but in a way that is optimized for easy production as vector.

The perspective works by “folding” horizontal and vertical layers into one dimension, so you can see the object orthogonally from both the top and the front.

This results in a kind of “chin” an the bottom of the object, which is shaded darker than the top surface, since light comes evenly from the top/back.

The perspective is achieved by folding the top and front views together

In practice, this usually doesn’t have a huge impact, since it’s also suggested to make objects not too tall, when possible. A lot of icons are just a simple 2D shape with a small chin at the bottom.

That said, it can look very weird when you get the perspective wrong, e.g. by folding the layers from the top/back instead of the front, so it’s important to keep this in mind.

Material & Lighting

Icons can make use of skeuomorphic materials (e.g. wood, metal, or glass) if it’s needed for the physical metaphor, but outside of those special cases it’s recommended to keep things simple.

Examples of icons with realistic materials

Straight surfaces have flat colors (instead of e.g. slight vertical gradients), but curved surfaces can/should have gradients. The corners on the chin on rounded base shapes should have a highlight gradient.

The highlight on the corners of the chin is done with a horizontal gradient.

Shadows inside the icon should be avoided if possible, but can be used if necessary (e.g. for contrast reasons). Do not use drop shadows that affect the app outline though, because GTK renders such a shadow automatically.

Icon Grid & Standard Shapes

In order to make sure icons are somewhat similar in size, alignment, etc. we have a grid system.

The canvas is 128x128px (for legacy reasons), but you’re designing for 64×64, while also taking 32×32 into account where possible. In general, it’s good to make sure you’re putting as many lines as possible on grid lines, so they’re sharp even at 32. Testing in App Icon Preview helps a lot with this.

Each of the grid squares is 8×8 pixels. In order to be pixel-perfect at 64 and 32, orthogonal lines/edges should be on these grid lines (or fractions of them).

The icon grid also has some standard shapes for wide, tall, square, and circular icons, which can be used as a basis for the structure of the icon if it makes sense for the metaphor (e.g. if the object is more or less square, use the square standard shape).

Protip: Great Artists Steal Reuse

There are lots of apps with icons in the GNOME style out there, and they’re all free software. If there’s something you like about another app’s icon you can get the source from GNOME Gitlab or Github, look at how a certain object is drawn, or just take (parts of) other icons and adapt them to your needs.

This is especially useful for common objects needed in many icons, e.g. pencils, books, or screens. The icon template in App Icon Preview comes with a few of these common objects on the canvas, which can be a good starting point for new icons.

Draw, Preview, Repeat!

Armed with this knowledge about the style and tooling, we can finally jump in and start drawing! In this case I re-did the sketch at a slightly larger size to get a better feel for it:

Now let’s try vectorizing it. Since the overall shape is a tall rectangle, we can start with the tall rectangle standard shape. If we change the color to brown, and make the chin at the bottom thicker (by resizing the top layer vertically), we have the basic frame for the shelf.

After that we can add the actual shelves, by simply adding two slightly darker brown rectangles (the back of the shelf), and two wide rectangles at the top of these (the bottom of the horizontal shelf).

Changing the color of the chin is a bit tricky, because it has a horizontal gradient. It requires selecting the bottom rectangle with the gradient tool, clicking each gradient stop manually and changing it to brown by clicking one of the colors in the color palette at the bottom edge of the window.

If you use e.g. Brown 3 from the palette for the top surface, you can use the Brown 4 or 5 for the chin, and Brown 2 or 3 for the highlights in the corners.

Let’s see what this looks like in Icon Preview now:

Getting there, right? Now let’s add some books. Lucky for us, book spines can also be drawn as rectangles, so this shouldn’t be too hard. We don’t want too much detail, because we’re designing for 64px first and foremost. Something like 10 books per row should work.

If we want to get fancy we can also round the top of the spine on some of the books by adding an ellipse of the same color, but it’s not really needed at this size.

Finished full-color icon in App Icon Preview

Looking good! I think we’re done with the full-color icon.

If at this point in the process you feel like the concept or metaphor isn’t working out (for example because it doesn’t look interesting enough, or because it’s too complicated to work at small sizes) you can always go back a few steps and try vectorizing a different one of your sketches. The nice thing about the simplicity of this style is that you can do this without losing weeks of work, making iteration on concepts much more feasible.

Symbolic

Now that the full-color icon is done, we can start thinking about the symbolic icon for our app. Ideally this is a simplified, one-color version of the app icon, designed for a 16×16 px canvas. It’s used in notifications and some other places in the Shell where a colorful icon would not be appropriate.

I won’t go into too much detail on this here since drawing good symbolics is a big topic, and this post is too long already. I might expand on this in a future post, but for now here are a few quick tips:

Alignment to the pixel grid is very important here if you don’t want the icon to end up a blurry mess
Stick to the original metaphor if at all possible, go for something else if not
Test in App Icon Preview to make sure the icon is actually recognizable at 16px
If possible leave the outermost 1px empty on all sides
Most strokes should be 2px, but they can be 1px in some cases
Don’t overthink it for the first version. This icon is a secondary thing, and it’s relatively little effort to fix/redo it later :)

Our bookshelf example looks tricky at first glance, because we have all these tiny books, and only 16 pixels to work with. However, if we simplify it enough it’s not too hard to get something decent. We can just use a two tall and two wide rectangles to draw the shelf, and three smaller rectangles as books on each shelf:

This one is literally just rectangles :)

And that’s it! We have a real app icon now, with everything that entails. If you want to have a look at the source for the icon we made in this tutorial, you can download the SVG here. It includes the final icon and some of the intermediate steps.

Export

Now that we’re happy with the icon, we can press the “Export” button in App Icon Preview and save the final icon assets. The app will automatically optimize the SVGs for size, and if you have nightly builds of your app, you also get an automatically generated nightly icon without any extra work!

Congratulations for making it all the way to the end! I hope you found this tutorial useful, and will go on to make great icons for your apps. If there’s anything you found unclear while following along, please let me know in the comments.

If you’re looking for more resources on the topic, check out the Icons and Artwork HIG page, the official guide on making GNOME App Icons, and the Icon Design Workflow wiki page.

Happy hacking :)

There is no “Linux” Platform (Part 1)

This is part 1 of a series of blog posts based on the talk Jordan Petridis and I gave at LAS 2019 in Barcelona. Read part 2 here.

In our community there is this idea that “Linux” is the third platform next to Windows and macOS. It’s closely connected to things like the “year of the Linux desktop”, and can be seen in the language around things like Flatpak, which bills itself as “The Future of Apps on Linux” and the Linux App Summit, which is “designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem”.

But what does that actually mean? What does a healthy app ecosystem look like? And why don’t we have one?

I think the core of the problem is actually the layer below that: Before we can have healthy ecosystems, we need healthy platforms to build them on.

What is a Platform?

The word “platform” is often used without a clear definition of what exactly that entails. If we look at other successful platforms there are a ton of different things enabling their success, which are easy to miss when you just look at the surface.

On the developer side you need an operating system developers can use to make apps. You also need a developer SDK and tooling which are integrated with the operating system. You need developer documentation, tutorials, etc. so people can learn how to develop for the platform. And of course once the apps are built there needs to be an app store to submit them to.

Developers can’t make great apps all by themselves, for that you also need designers. Designers need tools to mock up and prototype apps, platform UI patterns for things like layout and navigation, so every app doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, and a visual design language so designers can make their app fit in with the rest of the system visually. You also need Human Interface Guidelines documenting all of the above, as well as tutorials and other educational resources to help people learn to design for the platform.

On the end user side you need a consumer OS with an integrated app store, where people can get the great apps developers make. The consumer OS can be the same as the developer OS, but doesn’t have to be (e.g. it isn’t for Android or iOS). You also need a way for people to get help/support when they have problems with their system (whether that’s physical stores, a help website, or just easily google-able Stackoverflow questions).

That’s a lot of different things, but we can group them into four major pieces which are needed in order for something to be a real platform:

Operating System
Developer Platform
Design Language
App Store

So if we look at the free software world, where are the platforms?

Linux?

Linux is a kernel, which can be used to build OSes, which can be used to build platforms. Some people (e.g. Google with Android) have done so, but a kernel by itself doesn’t have any of the four things outlined above, and therefore is not a platform.

FreeDesktop.org?

What about “Desktop Linux”, which is what people usually mean when they say “Linux”? The problem is that this term doesn’t have a clear definition. You could take it to mean “FreeDesktop.org”, but that also doesn’t come close to being a platform. FreeDesktop is a set of standards that can be used to build platforms (and/or ensure some level of compatibility between different platforms). Endorsement of a single platform or set of technologies goes directly against FreeDesktop’s aims, and as such it should only be thought of as the common building blocks platforms might share.

Ubuntu?

What about distributions? Ubuntu is one of the most popular ones, and unlike others it has its own app store. It still isn’t a platform though, because it doesn’t have the most critical pieces: a developer SDK/technology stack, and a design language.

Other distributions are in a similar but worse position because they don’t have an app store.

GNOME?

GNOME is the most popular desktop stack, and it does have an SDK and design language. However, it only sort of has an app store (because GNOME people work on Flathub), and it doesn’t have an OS. Many distributions ship GNOME, but they are all different in various ways (more on this later), so they don’t provide a unified development target.

Elementary?

Interestingly, the only project which currently has all the pieces is elementary. It has an OS, an SDK, a HIG, and an app store to submit apps to. The OS is largely Ubuntu and the technology stack largely GNOME, but it develops its own desktop and apps on top of that, and does the integration work to make it into a complete consumer product.

This begs the question, why is elementary the only one?

The Means of Distribution

The reasons for this are largely historical. In the early days, free software desktops were a bunch of independently developed components. They were not necessarily designed for each other, or well integrated. This meant in order to have a usable system, someone needed to curate these components and assemble them into an operating system: The first distributions were born.

Over the last decades this landscape has changed drastically, however. While GNOME 1 was a set of loosely coupled components, GNOME 2 was already much more cohesive and GNOME 3 is now essentially an integrated product. The shell, core apps, and underlying technologies are all designed with each other in mind, and provide a complete OS experience.

Desktops like GNOME have expanded their scope to cover most of the responsibilities of platforms, and are in effect platforms now, minus the OS part. They have a very clear vision of how the system should work, and app developers target them directly.

The elementary project has taken this development to its logical end point, and made its own vertically integrated OS and app store. This is why it’s the only “real” platform in the free software space at the moment.

GNOME has a relatively vibrant ecosystem of nice third party apps now, despite not being a complete platform (yet). This gives us a glimpse of the potential of this ecosystem.

Distributions, on the other hand, have not really changed since the 90s. They still do integration work on desktop components, package system and applications, set defaults, and make UX decisions. They still operate as if they’re making a product from independent components, even though the actual product work is happening at the desktop layer now.

This disconnect has led to tensions in many areas, which affect both the quality of the system user experience, and the health of the app ecosystem.

What’s interesting about this situation is that desktop developers are now in the same situation app developers have always been in. Unlike desktops, apps have always been complete products. Because of this they have always suffered from the fragmentation and disconnect between developers and users introduced by distribution packaging.

Grievances with the distribution model, which affect both app and desktop developers, include:

Release schedule: Developers don’t have control over the pace at which people get updates to their software. For apps this can mean people still get old versions of software with issues that were fixed upstream years ago. For desktops it’s even worse, because it means app developers don’t know what version of the platform to target, especially since this can vary wildly (some distributions release every 6 months, others every 2+ years).
Packaging errors: Distribution packaging is prone to errors because individual packagers are overloaded (often maintaining dozens or hundreds of packages), and don’t know the software as well as the developers.
Overriding upstream decisions: When distributions disagree with upstream decisions, they sometimes keep old version of software, or apply downstream patches that override the author’s intentions. This is very frustrating if you’re an app developer, because users never experience your app as you intended it to be. However, similar to the release schedule issue, it’s even worse when it happens to the core system, because it fragments the platform for app developers.
Distro Theming: App developers test with the platform stylesheet and icons, so when distributions change these it can break applications in highly visible ways (invisible widgets, unreadable text, wrong icon metaphors). This is especially bad for third party apps, which get little or no testing from the downstream stylesheet developers. This blog post explains the issue in more detail.

The Wrong Incentives

The reason for a lot of these issues is the incentives on the distribution side. Distributions are shipping software directly to end users, so it’s very tempting to solve any issues they find downstream and just ship them directly. But because the distributions don’t actually develop the software this leads to a number of other problems:

Perpetual rebasing: Any change that isn’t upstreamed needs to be rebased on every future version of the upstream software.
Incoherent user experience: Downstream solutions to UX problems are often simplistic and don’t fix the entire issue, because they don’t have the development resources for a proper fix. This leads to awkward half-redesigns, which aren’t as polished or thought-through as the original design.
Ecosystem fragmentation: Every downstream change adds yet another variable app developers need to test for. The more distributions do it, the worse it gets.

The Endless OS shell is a great example of this. They started out with vanilla GNOME Shell, but then added ever more downstream patches in order to address issues found in in-house usability tests. This means that they end up having to do huge rebases every release, which is a lot of work. At the same time, the issues that prompted the changes do not get fixed upstream (Endless have recently changed their strategy and are working upstream much more now, so hopefully this will get better in the future).

This situation is clearly bad for everyone involved: Distributions spend a ton of resources rebasing their patches forever, app developers don’t have a clear target, and end users get a sub-par experience.

So, what could we do to improve this? We’ll discuss that in part 2 of this series :)

GNOME Shell Hackfest 2019

This October I attended the GNOME Shell Hackfest 2019 in the Netherlands. It was originally just planned as a small hackfest for core Shell developers, but then us designers decided to crash the party and it became a pretty big thing. In the end we were about 15 people from lots of different companies, including Red Hat, Endless, Purism, and Canonical. The venue was the Revspace hackerspace in Leidschendam, which is somewhere between the Hague and Leiden.

The venue was very cool, with plenty of hackerspace-y gadgets and a room with couches and a whiteboard, which was perfect for the design team’s planning sessions.

Allan, Jakub, and I were primarily there to make progress on some long-standing issues with GNOME Shell, such as new user onboarding, the app grid, and the spatial model of the Shell. We’ve wanted to address many of these things for a long time (in fact, some of them were already discussed at the London hackfest 2 years ago). In the weeks leading up to the hackfest we had already been working on this (together with Sam Hewitt who couldn’t make it to the hackfest unfortunately), preparing a number of concepts to be worked out in more detail.

At the hackfest we made these concepts more concrete, worked on mockups and prototypes, and discussed them with Shell developers. It’s still early days for all of this, but we’re very excited about sharing it more widely soon.

Jakub presenting some exciting prototypes to the Shell developers

We also worked on a number of other things, such as the new lock screen design, which Georges has started to implement, prettier Shell dialogs, and some changes to the system status menu.

Thanks to Carlos Garnacho and Hans de Goede for organizing, Revspace for hosting us, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel and accommodation!

LAS 2019

A few weeks ago I attended the Linux App Summit in Barcelona. I arrived very late on Monday night by bus, after almost not making it to Spain that day (my train from Paris stopped in Montpellier due to the rails being destroyed by a storm and the highway was blocked by a protest). Adrien, Julian and I had a shared accommodation, which conveniently was just down the street from the venue.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I attended some talks, but was mostly focused on preparing the talk Jordan and I had on Wednesday afternoon. Talks with multiple presenters are always tough, especially if there’s not much time for practicing, but I think it went okay given the circumstances. There’s a recording on Youtube in the day 2 live stream video.

Over the course of the conference I had lots of good conversations about the state of free software with people from GNOME and other projects. In some areas it’s exciting how far we’ve come (e.g. Flatpak), but in others it’s frustrating how little has changed over the past decades (e.g. fragmentation).

Adrien gave a talk about how GNOME Mobile slowly materialized over the past two years, especially on the application and toolkit side. I was also happy to see not one but two talks (by Florian and Daniel) about how very very dead the Systray is, without anyone really disagreeing. It’s nice to see most people maybe finally on the same page on this. Now we just need Ubuntu to stop shipping a certain extension… ;)

Later in the week I also managed to do a bit of hacking. Now that the GNOME OS images can get updates the main missing piece is an installer, so we discussed that with Javier and Valentin from Codethink. I was also very happy to meet Manuel (the maintainer of UberWriter) in person, and talk about some cool future stuff for that app.

Guessing game at the social event. They made me guess “gnome-look.org” 🙈

Overall the conference was great! Because there were so many GNOME friends it almost felt like a second GUADEC, but I also met many cool new people. Thanks to the organizers for putting together a great event, to Purism for paying for our accommodation, and the GNOME Foundation for covering my travel.