New icon artwork for our Matrix rooms! (and, possibly, for other things...)

gwmngilfen
Tue, 07 Nov 2023 16:43:08 +0000
Project Discussions

Howdy folks!

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!

This seemed like a good thing to have in the open, so with Emma’s permission I’ve created GitHub - ansible-community/icons: Ansible Community icons & icon generation workflow/files - for now this holds the Matrix icons we’ve been working on, but in the future, I can see multiple subdirs for other things (forum badges perhaps? )

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:

Using the Inkscape merge process, that lead to this output:

(click for detail)

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:

1. 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)

2. If you frequent certain rooms, does the icon work for your rooms?

3. 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…)

4. 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!

16 posts - 9 participants