(#6699) is also too much related to (#6668) where ideas for improving the new icon set should go.
Ok, no further offense taken.
I would like to bring up the question to what extent an icon can considered infringing on its original copyright. Maybe some legal advice form an expert in the field could help inform how far we’d have to depart from the original icons to be safe, as iconography and certain visual expressions are not unique, nor should they be covered by copyright.
That’s why I offered help to recreate icons, not as a format conversion of sorts, but capturing the visual concept to a degree that is recognizable. Whatever the legal implications of that, it would definitely have to be attacked on a per-icon basis and would be a lot more on the safe side than preserving the original icon files.
Regarding how to contribute to the new icons:
All icons have identifiers - is there a table with identifiers, old and new icons one can reference when making explicit suggestions?
In this period I am heavily using the nightly version and especially Eeschema.
Since the introduction of the new icons I am a bit sorry.
The color theme I don’t like is a shade of gray with few colors.
For example, I find myself having to wait for the text note to come out to understand if the icon is correct for the command I need.
Fortunately, more or less the positions are the previous ones and then I can find them.
The visual information is in my opinion very bad.
They are excessively or too simple or too complicated with multiple indications within them.
Intuitively, I can’t understand what the red symbols that are found in many icons mean.
They look like danger signs, they catch my eye but I don’t understand the meaning.
They cover part of the drawing below causing me confusion.
I was pleased to see that the main ones have changed in Kicad Menager and I believe that it is improving.
Personally I would like an icon theme consistent with the new program icon. Really beautiful all blue with Ki with the red dot.
I have expressed my opinion as I feel while using the program.
I don’t want to take anything away from the demanding work behind the production of graphics.
I should make the icons I think I would not be able to do a good job.
I hope that some of my suggestions or criticisms are constructive
for a continuous improvement of the application.
If you search for “Remove Red Number From App Icons on iPhone”, you’ll see a similar pattern also accused of being needlessly attention-grabbing and feeding into smartphone addiction.
I come to suspect that there is some specific platform influence in the new icons that might have made sense to someone, but now we have lots of icons that are extremely hard to distinguish and a big headache.
How does one quantify the quality of icons? We should have more objective criteria that can be communicated and tested.
One test I can come up with is de-featuring: imagine a simplified version of the icon with details and low-contrast features removed and see if it still makes sense and can be distinguished from other icons, or if it’s just a blurry mess.
I can also recommend that everyone interested in the subject watch this video by tantacrul where MuseScore iconography is taken to bits. It’s… cathartic. Enjoy!
Seriously, people - watch this video!
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Would be the best solution.
It’s like when you do a housing project and just put grass everywhere… then let people run how they want and after the grass is trampled down and tracks appear you put in the pavement 
I added https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/6707, support for external image files.
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I must add my voice here that I find the new color scheme both a bit depressing and confusing compared to the old icons (specially the use of red, and most of the green color gone). I think a lot of work was put in by several developers to find clear logical visual expressions last time the icons were updated, and it is sad to see that effort go away. I recall a number of iterations were suggested for the icons in the project manager, and how they evolved indicated to me they were drawn from scratch.
What are the requirements for an icon to not violate any unknown copyright? If an icon is redrawn from scratch in a way that is similar but not identical, would that be adequate to create a paper trail? (The analog is when known code is completely typed/written again from scratch to “clean it” for an open source project).
If this is adequate, we could, to not put load on developers call for volunteers that each will do one or a few icons that need to be replaced, but will have the same visual expression and colors as the old ones. Or is the issue that there is a monetary or work wise cost of registering copyright for icons previously created by developers that otherwise do not have a paper trail, so that one are stuck with using icons that already have an open copyright?
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Upvoted
Eventually users will publish icon set “skins” for KiCad with CC licenses.
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Yes, it should be enough. IANAL but I know a thing or two about copyright. Shapes are not protected by copyright (how could you own the visual shape of diskette or trashcan or…?). What is protected is individual artistic expression. The rule of thumb is that if someone would create similar work without actually copying it, for example wrote the same programming function for the same purpose, would it be identical or not? If not, it’s artistic expression. If you take a photo of a monument you own the copyright for the photo because nobody could take exactly similar photo. It doesn’t actually need artistic quality or creativity. For fun, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute. If you draw an image by yourself, using software tools, but don’t copy image data and don’t follow the original, you don’t violate copyright.
It’s not clear where the boundaries are, but clearly icons, like smileys, are necessarily so similar in different sets that the general appearance and shapes can’t be copyrighted. You can compare different icon sets of for example linux desktops, or different smiley sets like the one in this editing screen, and tell how similar or dissimilar they can be.
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@Seth_h, can you publish your research? The names of the icons which need to be replaced would be enough for volunteers, if you can add the needed information to the svg icon files which have paper trails. The old icons are in the git history anyways.
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The advice we have been given by our lawyers (US only) is that this is insufficient if the icon is visually distinct. In other words, you can only copy icons that don’t need to be copied because they are generic.
We are avoiding this altogether by having new icons drawn that we own the copyright on.
Again, anyone who has specific suggestions for improvements of individual icons should post those suggestions to the Gitlab issues. Generic comments about large groups of icons are not helpful and cannot be implemented.
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I am not sure what is meant by this. Surely the old version of a lot of the icons replaced were simply mimicking the visual appearance of Kidcad’s content itself. How could that be a copyright violation? For instance green wires with dot have been replaced by a blue wire with red dot that does not look anything like in the schematics. A net, global and hierarchal label looks like and have the same color as the label when it is placed on the schematics in the old version. The Eeschema icon looks like a very small schematic. Why can we not keep a visual appearance of the icons that actually look like and has the same colors as the visual elements used in the program itself?
I agree with otoien, I don’t understand what this means. About every desktop icon set has for example a trashcan. They are all visually distinct. They are similar but not identical. They are necessarily similar to each other, yet they are independent works, not copies or derivatives. If you take 5 trashcan icons, don’t copy bytes from any of them and create your own trashcan keeping those 5 icons as models but don’t follow any of them specifically, you haven’t infringed copyright. Otherwise all of those icons except the first one would be illegal.
With SVG it would be theoretically easier to create an identically looking icon without copying the source file, but we are not talking about exact copy of the appearance, either.
One generic issue I have with the new set is its temperature - it ‘feels’ cold.
Anyhow, gotta install a new nightly to see where I want to comment on, to give you proper feedback now 
I think that this is that you cannot make an icon similar to copyrighted artwork or design, something like the Warhol soup cans painting or the Monroe grating photo
Trashcans and floppies are generic
But in this case there seems to be an effort to make the icons different, just because we do not know if someone out there have created an icon that looks similar. That is a different case than if we confirmed that a specific icon was copied from a copyrighted non-open source. Again most of the old icons seem to have been inspired by the appearance of KiCad contents rather than someone else creation, and I would think that in itself would provide some protection if they were recreated in the same way. For instance if someone else had a copyrighted icon of green wires with a dot for a ecad application to describe their green wires and junctions, that should not barr anyone else to also use a green wire with a dot for their icon, when that is also the style of their application.
There has been a good effort to create new icons, but I feel that the background lead idea for how the replacement should be carried out has been misguided.
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Could you install inkscape, put it in dark mode and check if the visibility is okay? Just as a comparison point…
I think the premise of the icons is noun/verb i.e. For the add dot, the blue T junction is the context - 'a junction ’ and the red highlight is the action - ‘add a dot’. If you think of the icons in that way they make more sense. This conveys more information than a green junction on a green wire.
I agree that some of the icons are too small or too busy but I noticed that several have been reworked so clearly this is a first iteration.
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Yeah I have the same feeling that the down arrows would be better for ‘importing’ and that a (+) would express better for placing.
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