Icon Design

What's this?
Do you want to help MyPaint out by helping design icons for it? MyPaint is gaining tools and modes at an increased rate, but lacks good icons for many of the toolbar buttons and floating tools that you see in the non-fullscreen interface. If you have the time and a little skill with Inkscape, we'd love it if you could help out with our icon design project.

Getting Started


MyPaint icons are best created with Inkscape. We use the well-known Tango icon design guidelines and palette. The palette is built into Inkscape, and we have a template for you to use with nice pixel-edge and half-pixel alignments. The easiest way to make icons is to start at 48x48 and work down/simplify from there. You can typically work entirely within Inkscape if everything's neatly aligned.

A nice tutorial on Tango icon design: Roy Henningson - How to Create a Vector Light Bulb Icon with Inkscape, republished Jan 20th 2012.

Project Goals
TODO: general look-and-feel and stylistic guidelines for the icon set. License policy link goes here.

Work needed
TODO: table of icons we'd like making or reworking, along with an explanation of exactly what each one's for.

Resources
The tango and tango-art-libre projects provide many useful base icons which are license-compatible with the MyPaint source. You can check out their projects like so:

$ cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/tango login $ cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/tango co tango-icon-theme $ cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/tango login $ cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/tango co tango-art-libre

Feel free to use the area below as a dumping ground for prototype icons and brainstorming ideas you've created which might be useful to other icon designers.



Oh my. Those icons render horrifically with the version of rsvg we're using on this wiki right now. I may need to fix that before this page can go live... --Achadwick 14:49, 9 January 2012 (UTC)