Comment 4 for bug 522698

Part of having design guidelines is knowing when it makes sense to break them. Having mostly-monochrome icons in the panel makes the panel more elegant and coherent. But I think IM statuses are one place where we should not use monochrome icons.

There are two reasons for this. First is a competing consistency: the Away icon "should" look the same (a) in the panel, (b) inside the Me menu, (c) in Empathy's own status menu, and (d) next to contacts in the contact list. Any inconsistency here would be much more visible than (for example) inconsistency between the monochrome battery-charging icon in the panel and the colorful battery-charging icon in the rarely-visited battery information window.

Second is ease of distinction: for IM status icons it is difficult to distinguish them if they do not use color, as the Humanity icons in Ubuntu 9.10 unfortunately demonstrated. (What does a dark grey bubble with an arrow in it mean, again?)

Perhaps neither of these reasons would be enough on its own. But combined, I think they definitely are.

Now, there are three ways to implement this. (1) Have the Me menu use normal icons rather than -panel variants. (2) Have the Me menu use -panel icons, but have Humanity not provide them (so it falls back to the non-panel versions). (3) Have the Me menu use -panel icons, and have Humanity provide them, but make them exactly the same as the non-panel equivalents. Option 1 is what's happening now, but options 2 and 3 would provide most freedom for authors of other icon themes who have different opinions on this topic than I do.