Re: new icons and such... ideas?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Sunday, May 25, 2003, at 10:56  pm, Travis Tilley wrote:

> Hi all. Me and my artistic friend dan are going to work on icons for
> gnustep tomorrow, starting with gorm. What does everyone here thing
> icons should look like? My main goal is to make some things more soft
> and inviting... a bit more smooth and friendly. I want to try and be
> consistant, and not be distracting.

Clean and clear ... consistent with the NeXTstep look
See http://freespace.virgin.net/linux.users/NeXTSTEP/Abuse.jpg for an
image showing a load of icons (not all good of course).

I like the images in icons to be either -
1. a picture of a clear item without a background ... so it appears
floating in the centre of a grey tile (eg. Mail.app) or,
2. a square semi-photographic picture with a border (eg OmniWeb.app),
so that when it appears in a tile it looks like a picture in a frame.

I tend not to like the square images without a border.

> so far from the channel i have gotten:
> dont make them look like osx (dont worry i wont)

yep

> make them more descriptive than pretty

Well ... obviously the primary task of an icon is to be instantly 
recognisable
and give an idea of what the corresponding app is for.   However beauty 
is
very important too.  Most original NeXTstep icons were beautiful in a
modern, clean, elegant way ... that's the sort of prettiness I'd like 
to see.

> affiche and gnumail have nice icons, as does mplayer
> encod needs help
> waiho needs an icon desperately
> talksoup needs an icon
> better icons for code editor, project center, and gorm would be
> appreciated

To the best of my knowledge, the ink, gnumail, project center, and gorm
icons were all done by the same person and have a certain consistency
of style ... I'd like to see that sort of consistency maintained across 
the
core applications.  That being said, I've never thought that the 
brick-laying
image of gorm was effective (good idea, but the actual image is not
instantly clear) and the abstract-object-as-an-archery-target of the
project center icon is not at all intuitive.

> artsy people tend to forget about function (heh)
> dont let RFM do icons (???)

Me? I don't do icons.  A good critic does not often make a good artist.