I present you my first creative publication ever.

Motives

A while ago, I used an IM client for which existed a really well made emoticon theme I even continued to use with Kopete and Pidgin. Unfortunately, the work could not be shared freely and the creator seemed not to be contactable.

So I decided to create my own emoticon theme with the already mentioned theme as a major inspiration giver. I wanted the emotes to be plain and uniform in size so one gets the feel that all are belonging together (hence the name). Of course, I also wanted to allow derivative works, feel free!

There is no separate emoticon section, so I put them in there.

Installation

Put the extracted plainicons/ directory in either of those:

To install for all users:
/usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/emotes/

To install for just you:
/home/yourname/.purple/smileys/

You will be able to select the emoticon theme in Pidgin configuration.

This instruction is for Pidgin but I am sure they are easily portable to Empathy, if you find out where to put them.