[Design-team] Proposed Icon for Ticket #99

[Jakub Steiner]

----- Original Message -----
>From: "Bryan Nielsen" <bnielsen1965 at gmail.com>
>To: "Fedora Design Team" <design-team at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>Sent: Monday, October 4, 2010 4:52:11 PM GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin / Bern / Rome / Stockholm / Vienna
>Subject: Re: [Design-team] Proposed Icon for Ticket #99


>Here are some renderings of the new icon...
>http://xorengineering.com/dev/system-config-boot-22.png
>http://xorengineering.com/dev/system-config-boot-24.png
>http://xorengineering.com/dev/system-config-boot-48.png


Hi Bryan,
as Nicu already mentioned, scaling the high resolution icon down isn't going to work. As you see on all the gnome-icon-theme plates, we create pixel perfect variants for the small sizes. Even if it's SVG for editability, the artwork needs to properly align to the pixel grid to render sharply.

Here's a few links about scalable icons and pixel perfection --

http://jimmac.musichall.cz/log/?p=177
http://turbomilk.com/blog/cookbook/icon_design/10_mistakes_in_icon_design/
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines

I don't think the metaphor is a strong one. I gave it a little thought and think a flip switch + menu panel would work best for this -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakubsteiner/5051667578/. It is a little abstract and lacks a unique silhouette, but communicates this being a boot menu editor better than the overused computer + refresh arrows.

>I used some source SVG files from the gnome themes for the computer
>screen behind the arrows and I chose the largest screen in the source
>file to work with. There were several smaller screens in the same
>source file and I'm wondering if I should have used one of the smaller
>screens to get a better rendering for a small icon.

Indeed, the workflow goes like this - create the highres, scale it down for 48x48, remove all the detail that won't render. Get rid of all the mask tricks, put 1px strokes in place. Make sure everything snaps to the pixel grid (snap to bounding box in inkscape). Once 48x48 is down, repeat for smaller sizes. Once done, edit the icon name and context in the baseplate layer, hide the baseplate layer and render the icon with `./render-icon-theme.py icon-name`

Feel free to drop by at #tango on irc.freenode.org or #gnome-art on gimpnet where there are a few capable icon artists that can help with specific issues you might encounter.

cheers

-- 
Jakub Steiner
http://jimmac.musichall.cz