I know that Adobe is dreaded word in the open source world. No, I am not recommending you any Adobe products. This is something else.
You might have noticed that Adobe has two lettered icons for its products. This is plain, simple and yet elegant. Designer Rohit Awate has made similar icons for a few Open Source creative apps such as Gimp and Krita.
In fact, Rohit has initially released these Adobe style icons only for Gimp and Inkscape back in April. He got very good response for it and now he has designed similar icons for eight more open source apps. So this icon suite now supports:
Rohit requested me to feature it on It’s FOSS and I happily obliged. On the same note, if you have an open source project, be it an application, applet indicator, conky, books, themes or even a set of wallpapers, feel free to contact me. It would be in our interest to share it with It’s FOSS readers. Oh, and it’s free, as in free beer :)
Coming back to these Adobe style icons, using these icons is not straight forward as using icon themes in Ubuntu. It won’t automatically change all the applications’ icons. You’ll have to manually edit the each application file to use the new icon. It’s not a huge task and one can easily do it.
It’s not a huge task and you can easily do it in the command line. However, for the sake of beginners, I am going to illustrate the GUI way of doing it.
Using Adobe style icons in Ubuntu
Let’s see what you need to do in order to get these Adobe style icons.
Step 1:
Get the icons from the link below.
It’s compressed in zip format. Extract it and you’ll see a directory named Icons in it. You should copy this directory in a place where you don’t mess with files a lot. Because if you delete this Icons directory from Downloads directory, then you’ll have the application without an icon. You don’t want that, do you?
Step 2:
Now go to Computer->usr->share->applications location and look for the application for which you want to change the icon. In this tutorial, I am using Gimp.
Step 3:
Right click on the application and select copy. This will copy the path to .desktop file of Gimp.
Step 4:
Open a terminal and use the command below
sudo gedit <middle click and paste the copied desktop file path>
Step 5:
In this desktop file, look for the line that starts with Icon.
Step 6:
Now go to the location where you had saved the icons. Right click on the desired icon and select copy. Basically, you are copying the path to this image file.
Step 7:
Now go back to opened Gedit file and use the copied path in the following manner:
Icon=<copied path here>
Save the file. Log out, log in back and you’ll see that the icon has been changed.
It will be changed in the launcher as well:
Do note that it shows only G instead of the promised Gi. It’s because the icon version I used in this tutorial, had scaling issue. I was informed by Rohit that this has been fixed now so you should be seeing the correct icons.
I hope you like these new icons. It’s interesting to see such projects, isn’t it? If you have something similar to share with us, don’t hesitate to contact us.
