Ever looked at Ubuntu’s default icon theme Yaru and found yourself thinking: “Eh, some of those icons look too big”?
—No, can’t say I had either!
But it turns out some of Yaru’s icons are marginally oversized.
Yaru uses 4 different shapes across its app, folder and mimetype (file) icons, with the shape used based on what works best for whatever ‘design motif’ fits. (e.g., a vertical rectangle is used for document file icons as it is more analogous to a sheet of paper). The shapes are:
- Square
- Circle
- Vertical rectangle
- Horizontal rectangle
Of the 4 shapes the most common in Yaru is the ‘square’ (with rounded corners – but don’t call it a squircle cos that’s so 2014, y’all).
And it is the square shape icons which are a little out of kilter with the rest as they’re as tall as vertical rectangles but as wide as horizontal rectangles, as this “keyline” (as I think they’re called) comparison makes clear:
Yet much like my typos, I can’t say I saw the discontinuity until it was pointed out to me ;)
Thankfully, there are Ubuntu users in possession of better visual acuity and pixel pernickety-iness than I, and they did pick up on the fact that Yaru’s square-ish app icons (e.g., Startup Applications) lack ‘optical compensation’ with rectangles (e.g., Image Viewer).
With correct proportions identified, an appropriate new square size was settled on (not arbitrary so as to avoid anti-aliasing) and a set of new icons created to conform of the new guidelines to see how things compared.
As this change is more “pronounced” when you see it, here’s a quick GIF I threw together from screenshots shared on Yaru’s GitHub. It demonstrates the difference between current size and the optically correct icons:
It just looks more right, doesn’t it?
Yaru design team member ~ubuntujaggers is tackling the (tedious1) task of shrinking all of the ‘square’ icons down (which isn’t as simple as batch resizing since the elements inside have to scale and position within a smaller frame).
After that, a decision will taken about whether the shrunken squares will find their way in to Plucky.
Here’s hoping; while this is a small visual ‘paper-cut’ in the grand scheme of things it’s still important that Ubuntu is on top form in all areas, that includes design. Looking good and running good needn’t be mutually exclusive.
- To me; some people might find it fun! ↩︎