Review Icons for Luna - Consistency & Shapes

elementary icons started about 4, 5 years ago.
Dan evolved as a designer in the past few years and the work he does currently is quite above the earlier ones. Shotwell is sharper than Empathy's icon for example. This has, possibly, to do with the unified elementary desktop vision that formed, the choice on typography and the user experience that is sought by eOS.

Another thing is that, while icons look, in general, pretty good, they are inconsistently shaped. Quite few icons, specially new ones, tend to work with rectangular forms, be they themselves squares (update, acroread, marlin, application-default-icon, Beatbox...) or rectangular (Shotwell, Geary, places, switchboard, terminal...). Round icons like Midori's feel out of place in the dock as, while there is a variation of shape, it is mostly variations of rectangular shapes. The effect is visible in the latest Journal update in which there is only Empathy and Midori with non-rectangular shapes.

Perhaps the use of rectangles is more ingrained than one might imagine - given the smartphone culture we live in, it is a no brainier why. But, maybe, it could be a viable solution. I'm not speaking of making "Faenza" but rather, doing as is done with Shotwell, Geary and Eidete. They all work with rectangular shapes but are distinctively different - and they all look good in the dock or slingshot.

Or create a few rules for the treatment each application gets. Maybe system specific tools tend towards one shape while general applications go another way... In Mac OS, the Finder is rectangular, the system settings are rectangular and whatnot. They made it so other rectangular icons were slightly tilted as to differ from system specifics.

Or something else. As far as design go, there are multiple ways to solve this. Perhaps rectangular bases that allow different forms to evolve from within, or, who knows.

What I propose is a review process of the icon set for Luna, looking for what does and what doesn't work so well and how to make it as coherent as possible - at least, as far as the default apps icons go.