In my opinion, the ideal way to do this would be to crowdfund the effort and have new icons be drawn by a single paid, professional icon designer. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
In my experience, drawing an icon takes 30 minutes on average [1], after getting up to speed. Graphic designers on UpWork are perhaps $30-60/hour (we'd need to find someone who's qualified for this particular job). For an initial effort, there are about 160 icons that should be converted [2]. Ideally, we'd find someone to do it who could later be called upon to do another 6-700 icons to cover most of the remaining interface, if the first project is a success. As an alternative, for a crowdsourced effort, I'd be happy to do a "training" session by Zoom to show contributors how to draw icons in Illustrator according to the style guide described in NETBEANS-2617. I'm swamped until February 2021, though... Some issues to consider: * Programming and graphic design are two different skillsets. Programmers do not always produce tasteful graphic designs. * In the long term, we'd want to convert at least several hundred icons, maybe thousands [3]. This may be beyond what is possible with a volunteer effort. * If too many different people work on this, we will get a hodgepodge of different icon styles. * Normally, cosmetic issues are not very important. But in this case, the purpose of the effort is to make NetBeans look good, so aesthetics is actually a primary concern. * From my own experience, it took about 4 hours of icon-drawing work in Illustrator (which I already had some experience with) before I was fully "up-to-speed" with designing new icons. If multiple people are working on the icons, each person will have to go through this learning curve. * You often end up copying and pasting shapes between different icons. If many people are working on the effort, they will end up redrawing shapes that others have already drawn. * There are lots of little issues that contributors will get wrong--e.g. how vertices are aligned to the pixel grid. A lot of familiarity with the drawing software is needed. * If many people are working on the effort, a single person will still end up having to go through all the Illustrator files and cleaning them up to a consistent standard, naming scheme etc. For the simpler icons (e.g. two rectangles), this takes up as much time as drawing the icon itself. -- Eirik [1] See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/HiDPI+%28Retina%29+improvements?preview=/110692909/110692926/vectorized.png [2] https://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/misc/netbeans-icons/prioritized.html [3] https://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/misc/netbeans-icons/ -----Original Message----- From: Jaroslav Tulach <jaroslav.tul...@gmail.com> Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2020 4:29 AM To: dev@netbeans.apache.org Subject: Status of converting icons to SVG Hello everyone, hello Eirik. It is a while since the [support for SVG icons](https://github.com/apache/ netbeans/commit/ 51a01eb9cbfc6f342a1827d47f0b37e1b2f070a3#diff-721be4afbc5aed18d39b11702d02c9fd) landed into NetBeans code base. Is it used or is it just laying around? I do remember there was an attempt to start a community supported conversion of the icons. What's the status of such conversion? Were some (at least those visible in the toolbar by default) icons converted? Maybe we should ask guys that have a say in the wider community like Jirka Kovalský, Geertjan, etc. to make some buzz around the conversion? Have an "icon-a-hack-a-ton"? Last time I asked for help with reorganizing source files layout per cluster, the community reacted quite well. A lot of people contributed. Contributing icons shall be even easier and more fun, right? -jt --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@netbeans.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@netbeans.apache.org For further information about the NetBeans mailing lists, visit: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Mailing+lists --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@netbeans.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@netbeans.apache.org For further information about the NetBeans mailing lists, visit: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Mailing+lists
