Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 11:34 am Post subject: Re: New splash image - my responses
JKT wrote:
You could always invert the ship image if you did decide to choose an alternate layout. For consistency that would mean inverting the icon image too so you may not want to do that (however, it would make it more consistent with Apple's icons as these all lean in a \ direction).
Ugh, don't do that... I just tried it myself and it looks awful! _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 49 Location: Colorado, USA
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 1:00 pm Post subject:
Hmm... I can tell this is going to turn into "design by committee"....
Oh well.
Let me see; some comments:
Anonymous wrote:
* 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.
Well, OK. Don't forget how tiny the flags are in the icon. So, maybe a single solid colour, shaded a little so it looks 3D. But then... people will ask "what's the flag?".
Maybe this should be Ed's call, as it's Ed's brand we're talking about.
Ed?
Anonymous wrote:
* "Bringing the power of..." -- the "B" in "bringing" should definitely be capitalized. The other letters COULD be, depending, but maybe not.
Hah! I disagree! In fact I specifically down-cased the "B" when Patrick sent the new tagline to me.
Maybe I'm too much into marketing. I didn't want the upper-case B because it's not actually a sentence. And I really don't like the "let's up-case every word" style.
Let's, um, vote, shall we?
And, I may end up changing my mind about this anyway.
Anonymous wrote:
* 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.
Actually, if you look closely, there's already a darker area behind the ship. It's subtle, and not a lot stronger than the general dynamic range of the sea, so you may have missed it. I was looking for the effect (slightly) of "shadow on the water", rather than to have the ship pop out of the screen.
I can strengthen it a little, no problem.
Anonymous wrote:
* The two white lines above and below "Bringing the power..." should be equadistant from the text.
Yes, I know, and I can only attribute that to something Ed must've done when editing the picture. My original was more carefully laid out than that.
Anonymous wrote:
* 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.
What blue band? There isn't one!
Maybe you're referring to one of the quick how-about-this-font images that JKT posted?
JKT wrote:
Perhaps emphasise the waves around the front of the hull to give some sense of depth (if that isn't too hard!).
No, not too hard; and I'm planning to reshape it a little to improve the appearance of perspective. And I might experiement with some kind of wake to show course-travelled. But please bear in mind that this ship is already a stylized nonsense of a ship, so realism can only be pushed so far!
JKT wrote:
You can move the ship slightly higher to take it away from the text.
Yeah, yeah. Tried it. Several times. Didn't like it. It unbalances the overall composition. Plus, since I'm now thinking of a "bolder redesign", this will become irrelevant.
JKT wrote:
I think the legalese should definitely be justified or at the least, left or right aligned 'cos at present, in its centred format, it looks messy and out of place when everything else is right aligned.
Yes, I agree about the left-justified part. Point taken. Actually, it did look better balanced in the version I sent to Ed and Patrick. They added a bit more text, which exposed the raggedness a bit more. Maybe. *shrug*
I recommend that people leave off the comments for a bit. At the weekend, I'll do a new splash image, which'll hopefully hit the nail on the head. There are a number of design elements I want to experiment with.
Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 49 Location: Colorado, USA
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 2:07 pm Post subject: Re: One more comment...
Hi Patrick,
pluby wrote:
I suspect that you used a custom font for the image? If so, Photoshop is substituting standard Mac OS X fonts for your custom fonts which will cause your layout to change slightly.
I don't *think* I used any fancy font. *shrug*
Maybe what I'll do is once I've decided on a font for text that's not going to change (such as "NeoOffice/J"), I'll fix it in place by rasterizing it. This means that the only text pieces you'll be able to edit are the legal sections, which are less sensitive to pixel-correct design.
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 2:10 pm Post subject: Re: One more comment...
foxcorner wrote:
Maybe what I'll do is once I've decided on a font for text that's not going to change (such as "NeoOffice/J"), I'll fix it in place by rasterizing it. This means that the only text pieces you'll be able to edit are the legal sections, which are less sensitive to pixel-correct design.
I wouldn't worry about it. Ed simply moved the text around until everything lined up.
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 3:29 pm Post subject: Re: New splash image - my responses
foxcorner wrote:
* And no, I haven't changed any of the document icons. I'm not intending to. If there's a strong demand, however...
Patrick has already spoken to me about this, and I'm in the process. Providing the ship doesn't change, I'm hoping to have some done this weekend.
Generally I like Dan's original splash design--fonts, layout, etc.--the best of any I've seen, although the font in JKT's bottom right was nice, too. My only comment from the peanut gallery is that I have a very strong dislike for the "Bondi iMac" color of the background (that color in general, not limited to this background). I'd prefer something a bit more Aqua (blue) than green and maybe a bit more muted like the original Neo/J spalsh. The Bondi-blue-green is pretty bold and I'm not sure how I'd feel about seeing it on launch after launch from here on out
But the ship is very nice, very clean, and will look much better on the document icons!
As a new user, I wasn't going to get involved in this discussion. I actually hope we can have the option of dispensing with the splash screen altogether, as one does with Adobe Acrobat.
But then I saw those flags. Country-specific seems a *really* big mistake to me. As I read on, I saw that other, more seasoned users commented on this too, but I still feel the need to reinforce this concern here.
I have the neophyte's enthusiasm. I see the ship as tearing across boundaries, rather than propounding them, as any ship of state would do.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 8:24 pm Post subject: Re: New splash image - my responses
foxcorner wrote:
* 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.
Actually, this is nearly spot on target, ironically. I pulled the original image off of an 18th century map available from the Library of Congress. Believe it or not, the ship was sailing straight for Spain (or perhpas Portugal...):
There was all other cool shit in the map too like dragons and mermaids and stuff, but for some reason I pulled out that ship.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 8:32 pm Post subject:
VFrost wrote:
As a new user, I wasn't going to get involved in this discussion. I actually hope we can have the option of dispensing with the splash screen altogether, as one does with Adobe Acrobat.
The argument to splash or not to splash actually has come up in the OOo 2.0 splashscreen discussions as well. Generally, here's the logic for keeping the splashscreen:
OpenOffice.org (and, by extension, NeoJ) takes quite a bit of time to start up. It may be somewhat slower if it's the first Java app you start as well as the VM needs some time to load. Since the software might take anywhere from a couple of seconds to a minute to load, the logic is that the splashscreen lets the user know that *something* is going on, particularly with the updating progress bar. It's kind of like how Photoshop's splashscreen spins through all the plugins.
Ironically, putting up the window also stops the silly app icon from bouncing. I think that's when the Carbon event loop finally gets entered
Not to say it wouldn't be interesting to allow users to turn it off, but the splashscreen comes from OOo...we didn't insert it into NeoJ. All we did was to try and make it a little more relevant
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 8:38 pm Post subject: On fonts and flags and ships...
So it's come up a number of times above from Dan and others...I just wanted to reiterate that I have no personal attachment to colors or fonts or ships. I just kind of tried to pull an "O'Reilly book cover" job when I couldn't draw anything myself I also thought lashampoo's idea of replacing the ship with a twisty-twirly was cool too or something more modern. I think it looks cool.
The general response I've been getting though is that folks seem to have begun to associate NeoJ with the ship theme which would be the only reason to stick with ships as a kind of "branding".
Fonts: go at it. Dan W. did the initial layouts, but feel free to go crazy. Placement? Go crazy. Colors? Whatever. All of these are better then what I can do
FWIW, Dan W's original screenshot was mostly Arial Black, Arial, and ITC Stone Sans (not free, but I did purchase it to redo the splashes a while back).
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 9:11 pm Post subject:
Anonymous wrote:
* Does NeoOffice require a ™ or an ® after it? I've seen it with both (™ is at http://www.neooffice.org/).
The header bar on the top of neooffice.org is actually out of date. Now, it is registered, so it does require an ® for "registered trademark". The (TM) was a pending registered trademark.
A bit of history...originally I wanted "AquaOffice" but that's already a registered trademark of another software package, thus "NeoOffice" was born.
Anonymous wrote:
Is the correct spelling "NeoOffice" or "Neooffice"? I prefer the first, btw.
The actual trademark is a word mark and includes any capitalizations. I've always used MixedCaps myself, but regardless of the capitalizations it's still trademarked
Anonymous wrote:
Does OpenOffice.org require any kind of trademark identification?
No. "OpenOffice" is actually a registered software trademark belonging to a Korean company, not Sun Microsystems, so thus they had to change the name to "OpenOffice.org". Sun wouldn't pay for the rights to "OpenOffice". They can't register "OpenOffice.org" due to "stemming" as it can cause consumer confusion (e.g. "USNike" for a shoe company).
Long story short, no, OOo doesn't require any trademark identification since it isn't a registered mark (and isn't defensible).
This is similar to now NeoOffice/J is a trademark due to stemming off of the registered "NeoOffice".
Anonymous wrote:
Does Mac OS X?
Mac OS X does require identification. As far as I can tell, Mac OS X requires a (TM). Following Apple's legal guidelines for trademark usage, however, for things that are going to be international in distribution Apple recommends not using the (TM) or (R) marks and instead using the sentence of legalese I added to the bottom of the splashscreen ("registered trademark in U.S." blah blah):
Ironically, putting up the window also stops the silly app icon from bouncing. I think that's when the Carbon event loop finally gets entered
This is a big plus for slower machines which eat up a ton of CPU doing that stupid bounce. Also, the first time you run NO/J I think is the longest because java hasn't cached anything (at least I've noticed subsequent loads in Java apps in other applications).. so I think a notification to hold your horses would be appropriate..
Re-- nautical splash screens. It seems to have worked before...
Re-- the 1800s map. Better check w/the RIAA to make sure it's in the public domain. They may have grandfathered in anything before biblical times.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 10:51 pm Post subject:
ROFL
Ironically, I was actually the first person outside of Netscape/AOL to submit a bugfix for Mac Netscape 5. Pink said so too. It was for drawing glitches in the Mac XP front end sidebar. Got the e-mail in my Cyberdog archives. And the original sources too (the ones b4 they had to take out the zip stuff or whatever that was relicensed inappropriately).
Took them two months to incorporate the fix into the source tree. Needless to say that was the last time I submitted a Mozilla patch. Here's hoping we can do better
Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 49 Location: Colorado, USA
Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2004 9:00 am Post subject: Re: New splash image - my responses
sardisson wrote:
Patrick has already spoken to me about this, and I'm in the process. Providing the ship doesn't change, I'm hoping to have some done this weekend.
Great! No, the ship won't change... except probably the flag. But I'm guessing the flags are too small to see in the document icons?
sardisson wrote:
Generally I like Dan's original splash design--fonts, layout, etc.--the best of any I've seen, although the font in JKT's bottom right was nice, too. My only comment from the peanut gallery is that I have a very strong dislike for the "Bondi iMac" color of the background (that color in general, not limited to this background). I'd prefer something a bit more Aqua (blue) than green and maybe a bit more muted like the original Neo/J spalsh. The Bondi-blue-green is pretty bold and I'm not sure how I'd feel about seeing it on launch after launch from here on out
Actually, I agree. It is a bit of a strong colour. I'll mute it a bit and send it towards the blue.
sardisson wrote:
But the ship is very nice, very clean, and will look much better on the document icons!
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I also thought lashampoo's idea of replacing the ship with a twisty-twirly was cool too or something more modern. I think it looks cool.
