Making making beautiful beautiful

There are numerous reasons why I can’t move to a completely open sourced workflow with my commercial work. There are also reasons why simply I don’t want to. I bumped into one of these reasons again a while ago and I decided to do something about the situation.

The shoemaker’s children go barefoot

Ironically, the open source tools that are used to make beautiful things sometimes look ugly. To be more exact, the icons in the graphic applications usually come in various shapes, sizes and colors. There is few standards between different applications. Granted, some stock icons exist, but those stock icons exist outside the graphic applications as well and that’s why they are usually really generic.

Furthermore even the deliberately hand-crafted icons do not always describe their function well enough. Don’t get me wrong – in the right context and with adequate amount of knowledge about a certain application they probably make sense. However, there can be really vague and undescriptive for people who are not familiar with graphic editing – or these said applications. Finally, the same icon can show up in several applications for different actions and that isn’t helping anyone.

Due to all of the aforementioned problems, using open source graphic applications is painful, unintuitive and shameful for me. This is far from optimal, but fortunately we can do something about it.

Stop neglecting yourself!

It’s time to give our tools some love – thus, I announce Huego, a new undertaking by the Shimmer Project.

I have pushed the initial commit to the Huego GitHub repository today. We don’t have many things ready yet and the roadmap is still partly open, but our first target is an icon theme with some GTK modifications for GIMP. After that it’s highly likely that we will continue the work with Inkscape icons.

We would love any support and feedback on the project, so please be in touch! If you want to help us in a way or another, the best way to get started is come meet us in #shimmer on the Freenode IRC network – just ping either me or Simon Steinbeiß (ochosi) and we will answer when we get back (if we were away in the first place).

Until next time and more updates, let’s make beautiful things!

P.S. The Shimmer Project website should get a new look and update very soon.