New Icon and Splash Screen?

[fabrizio venerandi]

Nice icon!
I have only some doubts about the perspective for the ship (the wooden part). It seems distort to me, like an error in perspective. I'll write some in bugzilla about this.




f.

[yoxi]

Gorgeous... does this new look extend to doc icons as well yet? What a nice piece of work!

- yoxi

[JKT]

The icon etc is much, much nicer, but, I have two criticisms for the splash screen:

1. Perhaps the flags on the ship shouldn't specify any country (is it Spain at the moment?) - a skull and crossbones, or an open source specific symbol should be on them, or even a Mac symbol would be a better choice.

2. The fonts (Arial Black and Arial??) used for the text in the splash screen are exceptionally boring (I guess they are the same as the current version which were also boring). How about either something much more modern-looking like Futura or Century Gothic, or something in a more olde worlde style like Papyrus. Personally, I like the use of a font that demonstrates the ease of ligatures
in OS X such as Futura, Gill Sans or Papyrus above (between the fi if you don't know what I mean).

[MrGruff]

Gill Sans please - good clean lines, ships with the Mac and isn't the bastardised Helvetica (aka Arial) which everyone uses on Windows (when they aren't using Times New Roman).

[JKT]

Here is a quick and dirty look at a few of the alternatives:



Btw, the text in the box in the top left version says "This section of text should be justified and lower down - it's too close to the bottom of the ship at the moment"

[wchutt01]

Great looking splash screen!

These have a really clean fresh look to me.


I prefer the fonts on the bottom right screen.

I also would suggest the ship could be 15-20% smaller.

willie

[JKT]

Yet another version just to show the text formatting brushed up a little bit and an alternate location for the ship:

[pluby]

[JKT]

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the progress bar...

[foxcorner]

Hi all,

Thanks for posting the images here, Ed!

Glad you all like what I've done! Really, it was my first attempt at doing this kind of artwork. My wife says I should be an illustrator. (Better keep the day-job, I reckon. )

Here are my comments on why it's like it is:

* For the NeoOffice/J title, I emulated the font of the original, because I was cautious about changing too much. Ed's contributions in the thread indicate that the font was chosen as a reference to Microsoft's fonts as used at the time in the office products. For sure I'd *love* to choose a different font, but it has to be in concert with Ed. Maybe I'll create a few alternatives for him to look at. I agree that Arial is lacking in any kind of flair whatsoever! (And yes, I'm a Gill Sans fan too. I'll try it.)

* The perspective of the ship's hull does indeed look a little odd... go look at the original engraving if you want to see an oddly-proportioned ship!! Actually, I can fine-tune it a little by adjusting the line of the water along the bottom of the hull, which would give a visual cue of the lines of the ship. I might do that.

* Yes, the flags are spanish. I wanted something that was interesting, non-arbitrary, and had meaning, and which could be represented in the few pixels available - especially for the icon! And spanish seemed OK to me, because of the romance of "a Spanish galleon". The sea then becomes "the Spanish Main". And, of course, there's the history of the New World; Columbus and all that. NewWorld / NeoOffice... If Spanish isn't going to work, then I might just put the Union Jack there, cos I'm British myself. As for Mac or open source logos, etc: my reaction is: "cheesy"! Honestly, I *enjoy* the fact that the logo for this modern, cool software is something antiquated and romantic.

* As has been pointed out already, I do need to leave space at the bottom for the progress bar, which is why the legal stuff is placed where it is. And I'm hesitant to use a smaller font, because I want this stuff to be readable pretty much in the time it takes for the application to come up. Having said that, I've recommended to Patrick that he include the entire legal text in the "About" window too, so people can read it at their leisure.

* I disagree with the suggestion that the text should be justified. Justifying text is OK in some contexts, but in this case it would make the legal stuff into a visual slab that's even less appealing to read than it already is, IMO. I *know* that one is "supposed" to present legal text as "small print", because "no one ever reads that stuff anyway"; but I'd rather honour the intent by making it legible. Justifying the text has a similar psychological effect to that time-clipping they do in the "small print" at the end of cellphone ads on the radio. And using justification where it's not suitable can produce some inelegant results: one of you posted an alternative layout, which had the text "bringing the power of OpenOffice.org to Mac OS X" justified, which looked really odd, with super-big spaces between the words on one line. Me, I've grown out of thinking that justified text looks cool unless you know what you're doing.

* Some of the suggested alternatives that folks have posted have got things laid out in a different way. I may go this way. My original plan was to leave things pretty much unchanged, through not having a feel for how adventurous I should be. Not a problem. I'll have another look at it, along with looking at some different fonts. I agree that there's scope for a little more "cool" in the image. Plus, if I rearrange things, there won't be any need to reduce the size of the ship, as was suggested, because I should be able to keep a little more open water around it. Note, though, that I won't be adopting one of the suggested alternative layouts, because I don't want the ship to be sailing *out* of the image. It's got to be heading into the scene. Just my artistic braincell talking there.

* Patrick's been working with me on the legal text, which you can see is somewhat updated from the current release. The "prototype" tagline is on its way out - yay!

* Talking of legalese... I was thinking of including the OOo birds as tiny seagulls near the ship, but Patrick dissuaded me for reasons of image ownership, etc.

* Yesterday I also created a new image for the "About" window. Of course, if I choose a different font, I'll have to go through that exercise again...

* And, at some point, I'll create images for the web sites, for example replacing the one at the top of this page. Oh! There's those birds!!

* And no, I haven't changed any of the document icons. I'm not intending to. If there's a strong demand, however...

Stay tuned again - at the weekend I'll see if I can add coolness to the image.

Dan

[foxcorner]

Actually, the image Ed posted has been a little updated since I sent it to Patrick. He's added a little more legal wordage; and for some reason, the lines above and below the "bringing" tagline aren't spaced evenly from the text. Hm.

No matter - if I do a newer, bolder, cooler version, then those lines will be the first to go!

Dan

[Guest]

Looks very, very, cool. Here are some thoughts:

* Does NeoOffice require a ™ or an ® after it? I've seen it with both (™ is at http://www.neooffice.org/).

* Is the correct spelling "NeoOffice" or "Neooffice"? I prefer the first, btw.

* Does OpenOffice.org require any kind of trademark identification? Does Mac OS X?

* Flag-- I would prefer, for whatever my opinion is worth, that it be country-nuetral. An apple logo or whatever would require permission I'm guessing from Apple, since it could be confused with an apple product. A skull-and-crossbones might have connotations that this is some sort of pirated software and may not be professional enough for some applications. I'm thinking maybe a single, nuetral color? Boring, I know. I suppose I could live with the Spanish flag, but it might be a little confusing-- ie, is this a spanish product? Is this the spanish-language version, etc.

* "Bringing the power of..." -- the "B" in "bringing" should definitely be capitalized. The other letters COULD be, depending, but maybe not.

* Possibly slightly darken the area behind the ship (with a darken tool) about 5-10% so that the ship "pops" from the background. This could be done w/a new layer. Using a cloud of slightly darker color is a good trick for pushing elements to the front in a subconcious-type way- you could try it behind the text too.

* The two white lines above and below "Bringing the power..." should be equadistant from the text.

* The blue band under "Neooffice/J" doesn't line up with the right edge of the image. Also, maybe it could be gradiated dark to light or opaque to transparent or something so it doesn't look so-- 'drawing tool'. or, try the dark-cloud trick.

That's it! Nice work again.

[pluby]

[jakeOSX]

i know i am jumping into this late...

the ship looks great, a lot better than the one i made.
not that would be hard... =)

has this been made 'official'?

[JKT]