Full Circle Magazine FR

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**Over the years, I’ve used a wide variety of computer systems, both old and new, and I have to confess that my personal preference is for a GUI more closely aligned with the conventions and styles of the late 90s and early 2000s. Before that time, most computers didn’t have the graphical capabilities to do justice to the designers’ ideas. Pixels were large, color palettes were small, and the result often ended up being UI controls that were hardly a delight to look at. A little later, and the graphical prowess of even a cheap desktop machine allowed designers to experiment with more realistic, “skeuomorphic” controls, which often favoured style over substance.

Then came the era of the smartphone. Now we all carry powerful, colorful computers with ultra-high resolution screens that should open up a world of design options. But our big, chunky fingers don’t offer the finesse of a mouse pointer, so a lot of the UI design book of old is no longer relevant. We’ve thrown out small spinboxes and scrollbars in favor of large, finger-friendly alternatives. Ironically, we finally have machines that could do justice to the original ideas of the UX gurus of old, but instead, we render our UIs in flat colored rectangles. Is that a button, a menu, a label or a toggle switch? When everything is a solid colored box with some text in, it’s hard to tell.**

**While our buttons have become more colorful, our icons have taken a journey in the opposite direction. Increasingly the trend is for simple, single-color images. This has partly been driven by the use of ‘icon fonts’ in web frameworks which removed the burden of icon design from developers by supplying a vast array of pre-drawn icons, shoehorned into a font file so that they can be delivered to the browser as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, until quite recently, browsers couldn’t handle colored fonts (there was an exception in the form of SVG fonts, which allowed for colored glyphs, but Firefox never supported them so they’re more of a curiosity than something I would recommend using).

Despite finger-friendly buttons being most useful on phones and tablets, and colorless icons having some small benefit on the web, both these trends have made their way into applications whose home is really only a desktop or laptop machine.**

**All of which is to explain that I’ve turned into a curmudgeonly old man who thought it was all better in the past. At least when it comes to UI design. As such, I still insist on using the ‘old fashioned’ colored icons within Inkscape, rather than the ‘symbolic’ style that was added a few releases back. I find it easier to distinguish icons from one another if they differ in multiple ways – their placement in the application, their shape and, yes, their color. I don’t really understand the logic of removing one of these identifiers. Mind you, I also prefer a light theme and I do recognise that, when used with a dark theme, most of the classic colored icons are too bright. Personally, I think this calls for a set of colored-but-darker icons, but I guess that a single set of largely colorless icons is easier to create and maintain across both dark and light UI themes.

I just wanted to put my biases on the table before I take a look at the latest icon set to become available in Inkscape.**

**I’m running Inkscape from an AppImage on a Ubuntu Mate 24.04 desktop. This gives me access to five different choices of icon theme, via Edit > Preferences, then selecting the Interface > Theming pane. Those five options are:
•  Dash
•  hicolor
•  multicolor
•  Tango
•  Use system icons (mate)

The first of these is the new theme, and I’ll come back to it shortly. Before then, however, let me show you a screenshot comparing the top-left corner of my Inkscape window with each of the last four selected.

Starting at the top-left, ‘hicolor’ fails to live up to its name. Some of the icons are colored, but many of them – especially the system tools at the top – appear as simple, monochrome icons. I can only assume that those icons are missing from the hicolor icon set, and fallback icons have been used – but it seems an odd omission to not include the file, print and clipboard icons in the main set.**

**The second theme, ‘multicolor’, has a thoroughly misleading name. As you can see, it’s entirely monochromatic. Enabling the ‘Use symbolic icons’ option adds some colored accents to the icons, which does help to categorise them more. But on a light theme, some of those accents almost disappear, effectively making the shape of some icons harder to see.

The ‘Tango’ icon set, again, lacks some of the system-level icons, and falls back to flat colored icons. Though it’s interesting to note that these assumed fallback icons differ between ‘hicolor’ and ‘Tango’, which suggests that in at least one of those cases they’re not actually fallback icons but have, presumably, been included in the icon set deliberately. ‘Tango’ also suffers from some extremely light coloring on many icons – especially the tools themselves – which actually serves to make them look like they’ve been disabled.

Which leaves the System icons. Colored and consistent throughout. Shapes and colors differ between icons, making it easier to identify them at a glance, and they’re all distinct and clear without being too overpowering.**

**No prizes for guessing which icon set I actually use.

So, let’s see how the new ‘Dash’ icon set compares. According to the Inkscape 1.4 Release Notes, this theme “reduces complexity on some of the existing icons, while still being explanatory”, and it “also borrows some concepts from other software”. Let’s take a sample from the top-left of my Inkscape window to see how it stacks up against these claims.

My immediate reaction is that I think the tool icons down the left are pretty good. They’re clean and understandable, and rendered at a comfortable line thickness. The icons at the top, however, seem a little too lightweight in comparison. It almost feels like they’re rendering a little too small for the space available – they could all have been a pixel or three larger without encroaching on each others’ space. To be fair, this criticism can also be levelled at some of the other icon themes, but the addition of color, or the weightier style of the other monochrome icons, tends to compensate for the smaller size somewhat.**

**I can’t say much about the claim to borrow some concepts from other software – at least not without more details. Which concepts, and from what other software? It’s an ambiguous statement that could represent anything from the concept of clipboard operations being represented by a clipboard icon, through to a wholescale reproduction of another program’s icons. I’m definitely in favour of consistency across applications, so any unification of icon styles between them seems like a step forward to me. But without knowing more details, it’s hard to say if this feature is supposed to appeal to refugees from the Adobe world, or if the intention is for Inkscape’s UI to feel more at home next to The GIMP or Krita.

One thing that this icon set definitely has going for it, however, is consistency. Compared with the odd mixture of colored and monochrome icons I get with ‘hicolor’ and ‘Tango’, at least these all feel like they belong together. The Release Notes go on to state that there are “500+ icons, with cursors, scalable and symbolic versions.” I’m not going to count them all, but that claim does at least suggest that you’re less likely to run into a fallback icon with this set than with some of the others.**

**The statement about ‘scalable’ icons seems like pure marketing spiel. As far as I can tell, Inkscape doesn’t offer a way to adjust the scaling of icons in the UI, so the fact that scalable versions of the icons are available is of little use to end users. And what about those ‘symbolic’ versions? Here’s a comparison between ‘multicolor’ and ‘Dash’ when the ‘Use symbolic icons’ option is selected.

While ‘multicolor’ finally lives up to its name in this mode, ‘Dash’ appears to be identical whether the symbolic option is selected or not. Perhaps I’m missing something, but the claim to have symbolic versions of the icons seems to be somewhat overblown to me. Perhaps some of the more obscure icons do something useful in Symbolic mode, but if I have to go hunting through all the dialogs to find them, then the option may as well not exist in practice.

The final claim in the Release Notes is that Dash “works on dark and light themes”. We’ve seen how it looks on a light theme, so I guess it’s time for me to embrace the dark side of my computer…**

**Clearly, this is where the Dash theme shines – which is an ironic turn of phrase when talking about grayscale icons in a dark theme. It seems to me that Dash is best suited to users with a light theme but an austere taste in icons, or those with a dark theme. By comparison, on a dark theme, the more colorful icon sets look awful – including my preferred System icons.

Even with a dark theme, however, Symbolic mode seems to do nothing to Dash. Interestingly this checkbox does have an effect on some of the other icon themes: hicolor and the System icons both switch to a monochrome icon set which is more suited to the dark theme (and perhaps suggests the source of those different fallback icons we saw earlier).

Speaking of monochrome icon sets, the screenshots I’ve shown so far might have led you to believe that Dash is entirely grayscale. Although the vast majority of the icons are either grayscale or entirely monochrome, there are some colored icons included where the subject matter requires it. Below is a screenshot of part of the Dash icon directory inside my mounted AppImage:**

**As you can see, there are some colored icons which are used within Inkscape for some color-related features – such as the color wheel option in the Fill & Stroke dialog. These appear sparingly in the UI, so even with a dark theme, they don’t scream for attention in the same way that a full set of colored icons does.

Themes, colors and icons are, of course, a very personal choice, and you should definitely experiment to find out which combination best suits you. If you’re the sort who prefers more minimal icons – and especially if you use a dark system theme – Dash could be just what you need to make Inkscape look a little more cohesive and polished. But if you’re an old-fashioned grump who prefers things the way they used to be, then for now, at least, there are still other, more colorful themes available. If you’ve never explored the various options available to you, perhaps it’s time to do so. You may well end up back with the same theme you started with (I know, I have) – but there’s a chance that your new favorite is just a few mouse clicks away. Assuming your imprecise, smartphone-stabbing fingers still know how to click a mouse.

References

Inkscape 1.4 Release Notes: 
https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.4**