Proposal to tweak existing icons and add new ones

A week ago I presented a quick proposal to folks on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. to add a few new icons and tweak some of the existing ones. The initial proposal was captured in last week’s meeting notes, but I’ve been working on said icons since and wanted to cristalize the final group of icons on this post.

All of these icons have been added to the Proposals page on the WordPress Components Figma file.

Tweaking existing icons

The suggestion is to make a slight tweak to icons that have human representations, replacing the solid dot (generally reserved for interface elements) for a more open, outlined shape. I personally find this change humanizes the icons a lot, and makes them much more consistent with themselves and rest of the library.

Changes:

  • The solid dot for the heads turns into an outlined shape.
  • Icons affected: people and block-post-author.

Adding new icons

The goal with these is to extend the icon library, and do so respecting the foundational philosophy and icon architecture. The more comprehensive the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. icon library is, the more useful it becomes to blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience./theme/pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party authors. And the more it becomes a common good, the more cohesive the WordPress experience will be, and more people are willing to contribute back to it.

Additions:

  • bug/no-bug – useful in technical contexts such as issues, bug reports, fixes, changelogs, etc.
  • security – using the shield metaphor to convey protection against existing threats, applies to site health and plugins in general.
  • add-card – a generic element to add new elements beyond just the block editor.
  • key – to be paired with the lock icons, or for plugins that support licenses.

Worth repeating that the idea is to add icons that can be used by anyone, in diverse and distinct contexts, and serve multiple purposes.

Feedback

Would love to hear your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions on the above. If there are no major disagreements or changes to be done, the next step would be create a PR to submit all of these to the repo.