balance in proportion and color

brainchild0 commented 4 years ago

Below are three screen captures from Nemo, the file manager supported by Linux Cinnamon, showing the contents of a directory created for purposes of demonstration.

The desktop environment has been applied with a version of the Mint-Y window and widget themes, and the Papirus icon theme, with folders set to brown.

The neutral hue of the folder icons and window decorations coordinate well. The plain text and markdown icons also look appealing together with these other elements.

In this scenario, however, the other icons, for Zip archives and Debian packages, are considerably distracting. The brightness of their pastel colors, combined with their comparatively large size, especially for the Zip archives, overwhelms the more subtle and more neutral features that surround them.

Other features of the theme have a distracting effect in certain scenarios. The lock overlays, for read-only permissions, are large, black, and opaque. Their effect is even more pronounced when combined with the Xs that indicate non-read permissions.

Many possible artistic approaches are possible for enhancing the appearance of these scenarios.

A few of them are as follows:

Avoid high-value (pastel) colors.
Minimize differences in opaque surface area for various icons. Use similar width and height among rectangular icons, slightly smaller than the radii used for circular icons.
Use overlays of smaller size.
Use overlays with smaller amount of opaque surface area.
Avoid overlays of very high- or low-value colors (for example, use gray instead of black or white).
Eliminate or minimize use of multiple overlays at the same time (for example, indicating a file is not writeable when it is also not readable).

Screenshot from 2020-06-07 05-18-22