Indee, at small size they do not look very distinctive. It should be noted those icons are from the early days, before we had any guildelines or best practices.
bold-italic.png

I agree as well with the part that they are not distinguished good enough. However using b/u/i might not be the best practice either (think about non-English speaking countries). If you take a look at e.g. gnome-icon-theme they use small "a" for all those icons and that makes it distinguishable enough as bold "a" is considerably different from italic "a". I hope we'll be able to rework it in similar manner. Also I deem it high priority and a must-do for 0.4 release, so adding to the 0.4 milestone.

Reference:
[http://people.freedesktop.org/~jimmac/icons/]

Replying to [comment:1 mso]:

I agree as well with the part that they are not distinguished good enough. However using b/u/i might not be the best practice either (think about non-English speaking countries). If you take a look at e.g. gnome-icon-theme they use small "a" for all those icons and that makes it distinguishable enough as bold "a" is considerably different from italic "a". I hope we'll be able to rework it in similar manner. Also I deem it high priority and a must-do for 0.4 release, so adding to the 0.4 milestone.

Well, in typography world, some typefaces like Liberations (based on Arial and Helvetica) have italic different than regular so they should be used as reference. Other like MgOpen MoDa have similar regular and italic fonts which should be avoided.

We're changing the future goals of the echo project and as such this bug is becoming obsolete and will be fixed in echo perspective when the new icons are created.

Milestone 0.4 deleted