Hi!
Very exciting. I will updating our mockup design for the new oacs website layout when 5.5 is released so this work is also really great news.
Here are some thoughts:
1. There is nothing wrong with creating all new iconography from scratch. That indeed is probably a wortwhile effort. My personal thinking is that we should simply re-use whatever is already available in the open source world and maybe just modify the colour palettes to match the new zen theme.
The most important feature of re-using existing work is not really the labour saving, but spreading out the labour for creating new iconography as the toolkit capabilites expand. If we choose to re-use iconography from an existing project then we will benefit by having a unified set of design guidelines to follow, not just by us, but by developers to oacs that come after us.
A unique icon set requires design guidelines to also be developed which is an added amount of work, re-using work from an established project allows us to re-use their guidelines and by extension re-use their labour for current and ongoing work.
Of course, they benefit as well from our particapation.
2. Probably the #1 icon project that we should be looking at is the Tango Icon library project at http://tango.freedesktop.org.
The goal of this project is to try an offer a unified design guidelines and a icon library that all projects can use. It is primarily aimed at the desktop environment so not all iconography may be applicable but some overlap may exist.
3. The second icon project that we might want to look at is the Oxygen Icon project for kde4 at http://www.oxygen-icons.org. It is a more up to date look than the Tango project as Tango seems to be very gnome centric and very "blah".
Personally, I think any approach you take will be fine. Tango makes more sense because it's not toolkit/desktop centric while Oxygen is designed for KDE4, but either picking another iconset project or starting from scratch is fine.
Thanks for jumping in on this!
Robert
