Skip to content
Daniel Foré edited this page Oct 13, 2016 · 7 revisions

Icon Naming Specification

This is based on the freedesktop.org Icon Naming Specification and aims to document all the icon names provided by elementary icons and their purpose.

Fallback Naming

The dash “-” character is used to separate levels of specificity in icon names, for all contexts other than MimeTypes. For instance, we use “input-mouse” as the generic item for all mouse devices, and we use “input-mouse-usb” for a USB mouse device.

Actions

Icons which are generally used in toolbars and dialogs for interacting with the user.

Name Description
address-book-new Create a new address book
align-horizontal-center
align-horizontal-left
align-horizontal-right
align-vertical-bottom
align-vertical-center
align-vertical-top
appointment-new Create a new appointment in a calendaring application
bookmark-new Create a new bookmark
call-start Initiating or accepting a call
call-end Stopping a current call
contact-new Create a new contact in an address book application

Apps

Icons that describe what an application is, for use in the Applications menu, Multitasking View, and Dock. These may or may not be generic depending on the application and its purpose. Applications which are to be considered part of the base desktop, such as the calculator or terminal, should use the generic icons specified in this specification, while more advanced applications such as web browsers and office applications should use branded icons which still give the user an idea of what function the application provides.

Categories

Icons that are used for categories in the Applications menu or System Settings, for separating apps, preferences, and settings for display to the user.

Devices

Icons for hardware that is contained within or connected to the computing device. Naming for extended devices in this group, is of the form --. This allows ease of fallback to the primary function device name, or ones more targeted for a specific series of models from a manufacturer. For example, a theme author may want to provide icons for different phones. The specific model icons could be named “phone-samsung-t809”, “phone-motorola-rokr”, and “phone-motorola-pebl”. However, the theme must provide a phone icon in the theme's style, so that devices not matching these models, will still have an appropriate icon.

An exception to this rule is that the “media” icons do not need to include manufacturer names, as they are generic items, and may be available from many manufacturers. As a result, for media, the specific icons are to differentiate between different specific types of media. For example, an artist may wish to provide icons for BluRay, DVD, HD-DVD, CD-ROM, and variations thereof. The specific media type icons should be named in the form, -. Some examples are “media-optical”, “media-optical-bd” and “media-optical-dvd”.

Emblems

Icons for tags and properties of files, that are displayed in the file manager. This context contains emblems for such things as “read-only” or “photos”.

Emotes

Icons for emotions that are expressed through text chat applications such as :-) or :-P in IRC or instant messengers.

Mimes

Icons for different types of data, such as audio or image files.

Places

Icons used to represent locations, either on the local filesystem, or through remote connections. Folders, trash, and workgroups are some examples.

Status

Icons for presenting status to the user. This context contains icons for warning and error dialogs, as well as for the current weather, appointment alarms, and battery status.

Misfit Toys

Icons which are currently in the wrong context and probably need to be relocated

Name Description
appointment
Clone this wiki locally