We’ve been aware (for cough some time) that the room icons in Matrix are not great. I mean, sure, some of them are great (looking at you, Docs!) but most are placeholders.
I approached Fedora over the summer to find out how they deal with this, and they were kind enough to walk us through the process for using a single template base image, along with a CSV file of data and images, and produce a directory full of images. Huge thanks to Emma Kidney for her time and patience!
Back to Matrix, the goal was to have a consistent image set, using our community colours. We landed on using the colour for the space, and an icon for the room content. Here’s a couple of notes from Emma’s original epic. Firstly, here’s the template, along with the base colours:
So! That brings us to today - @cybette and I have been excited about these for a while, but first I want to know some things:
How does this feel in general? Is the base-template & colour use OK (because that’s hard to change in the future, we’d have to change every icon)
If you frequent certain rooms, does the icon work for your rooms?
Are any icons flat-out wrong? I feel like flags for language rooms probably isn’t right (there are more French-speaking people than just in France…)
Specifically to our own design people (ohai @rebeccahhh) is this OK with you? My goal was to learn about this automated process so we could have all the templates and images in one place, rather than bothering you ad-hoc all the time (this will be a bigger problem with forum badges :P)
Assuming the feedback here is not awful, I’ll work on rolling out the ones our team is directly responsible for (Social, etc), and work with room owners on the rest of the icons. Give me your thoughts!
I really like the icons and the design/color theme! They are great!
The country icons are also fine (flags = countries), and the Europa icon is also fine (most folks think that that’s the flag of the European Union, which is true, but it also is the flag of the Council of Europe, which makes it include all European non-EU countries as well: Flag of Europe - Wikipedia).
How about using an icon similar to social/help/community icons, but with the language name, resp. its 2- or 3-letter ISO codes (ISO 639 - Wikipedia)? (Though in the cases of French and Spanish these codes are close to the name of the country as well, but as opposed to a flag there is ambiguity, while a flag only specifies the country.)
@felixfontein Right, I was thinking of that problem with the flags - no blame to Emma, that was a long list of rooms I provided so it was a lot to do.
Where I got stuck was indeed thinking about possible replacements, which is why I decided to present it as-is and get suggestions (even though I already knew we wouldn’t deploy those ones).
That could work - we’re using the Iconify Material Icons, so something like this E would be trivial. There’s no 2-letter icons that I can see, but we could work that up, I’m sure, it’s all SVG.
You can simply add text to a SVG. One downside of i is that it renders wrong if the font used is not present in the environment that renders the SVG. For that to not happen the text has to be converted to shapes. But that can also be automated as well (Inkscape can do it IIRC).
Of course! In general I plan to work with room owners on individual icons, the goal with this topic is to check we haven’t missed anything obvious with the template & process.
I like the new icons. If I may just suggest something: Some icons don’t feel well centered. It’s especially noticeable on the Elephant for PostgreSQL and a bit with the dolphin for MySQL.
The Switzerland flag got the rights colors, so I can’t be more happy
They are looking great! It looks like the pool/teal are for general purpose (social, help, meetings), and dark blue for work groups. Is that right? Or it was to show the two alternatives?
A couple of suggestions:
The DaWGs logo might need a white stroke path to improve contrast with the background around dark areas
Storage and Packaging look a bit too similar, maybe Storage could use the mdi:database one which is also quite common for data store, or the mdi:nas one one.
We seem to be missing the Release Management one. @anwesha might have a suggestion on that one. I like the rocket launch icon
+1 to comments above by @felixfontein on using the 2-3 letter code for languages. I didn’t see letter codes within the mdi set, but there are a few in the material symbols one, like this one for ES.
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