I'd like to explain the emblems I got in use right now, mostly thanks to the tango generator icon theme, and how this method should be the gnome standard and really a default for the human theme.
What emblems to include
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It's simple, when you click the applications menu, you'd see icons like "office", "development", "sound and video" (aka multimedia) , the first good thing about the emblems made by tango generator is that it uses those icons as emblems. So, for folders you can really categorize them correctly.
Another great emblem is the "star" tango emblem, firefox, gmail all are starting to use these stars to mark the more special things , a little star emblem helps me determine what things are priority, much better than such clock emblem.
So, the list of emblems to include would be:
special (the star icon)
trash/dump (This uses a mini trash icon)
multimedia (icon currently in use by sound and video category in applications)
development (The menu one, for example in tango it is a construction helmet)
art (The one used by "graphics" category in the menu)
office (idem)
system/gear (Again, from the menu, optional, but I found it useful)
download/web (I guess the one from the menu works)
fun (A smiley)
danger (A bomb icon probably)
urgent (I guess some people would want to use this instead of starred)
money (A human themed $$ sign could work)
Looks
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The current human theme emblems are the reason I have moved to tango, the emblems all look the same, I think that actually using a badge shape for all of them is a bad idea, the emblem icons should all have shape and colors that make them recognizable between each other.
Notice that this is what OS/X, windows, KDE and many gnome distros do already.
How to place them
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Existence of emblems is currently not too evident, they can help the user organize his folders and documents, but the user doesn't know. I really think emblems need an option in the file/folder's right click menu where you get to see the emblems' icons and names as part of an "emblems" sub menu. And you can click to enable/disable an emblem.
Behavior
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This emblem list, or at least another emblem list not matching the one I posted, must be a gnome standard, so a gnome theme should introduce icons for the accepted emblem list, right now the availability of emblems depends on the icon theme, an icon theme should only affect look and never functionality.
Home
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While on this topic, I think the icon for the home folder should actually be a home, and not a folder with a home drawn on it. There should be an easy way to access it, call it in the desktop or as an icon in the (almost empty) upper panel.
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