I just ran across an issue which I have never seen before and I was unable to google anything useful regarding this as well.
Basically, after I set my Unity launcher icon size to 32, the icons lost their background boxes. Uploaded image: http://postimg.org/image/mwq4crb7p/
What I was able to learn is that these images are located in /usr/share/unity/icons/
The icons do exist. (squircle_base_54.png, etc)
However I'm afraid that something has broken that links the images to the launcher.
I have tried resetting the compiz config and unity with the following commands without any success:
unity-reset
dconf reset -f /org/compiz/
rm -rf ~/.config/compiz-1/compizconfig
setsid unity
I am running on Ubuntu 14.04LTS 64bit and I appreciate any help that can be provided as I'm not that good in Linux based systems yet. I only know the basics.
Best Answer
This seemed to be an issue with scaling and Unity desktop.
After I reset the "Text scaling factor" to 1,00 in Unity Tweak Tool and also reset the "Scale for menu and title bars" to 1, the boxes re-appeared without even requiring a logout. Now I am able to resize them again to the 0,875 as is my preference. I do hope that this topic here helps someone who might experience the same behaviour from Unity desktop. =)>