I tried the latest Oxygen icons today and immediately decided the whole desktop looked better. Then I used it for an hour and discovered that “looks better” and “is easier to read” are not synonyms.

My first attempt was to set every available Oxygen component at once: icons, window decoration, widget style and colours. The result was certainly consistent. It was also difficult to distinguish a few small toolbar actions, especially disabled ones. At 16 pixels, subtle gradients become subtle grey soup.

The mechanism is mundane. An icon theme must communicate shape at several fixed sizes, not merely survive being scaled down from a handsome drawing. The new SVG source helps artists produce multiple sizes and keeps larger icons crisp, but it does not remove the need for deliberate small variants. A tiny icon has almost no room for texture, perspective or philosophical nuance.

I switched the toolbar to larger icons and kept text beside the less obvious actions. That made Dolphin and the configuration tools much easier to scan. I also stopped blaming Oxygen for missing actions and unfinished panels. Artwork can make incomplete software pleasant to inspect, but it cannot implement a file operation through sheer shininess.

Oxygen already gives KDE 4 a strong identity, and I prefer its restrained colours to the louder themes I usually replace after five minutes. Still, visual consistency is only useful when the symbols remain distinct. My practical conclusion: judge icons at the size actually used, not in the preview window. The preview window is where all icons go to lie about their career prospects.