Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 11:31 pm Post subject: small icons
Ahoi there! I wanted to share my opinion about the new icons. I have followed this discussion with great interest because the old icon really looked sad to me. The new version is much better. The large one seems just perfect. However, looking at the small ones I keep on thinking that something is missing there. The nave (is this the English word for the body of a ship?) seems not right. There is something missing that would give a sense of shape. I would suggest to put some accented lines that would stress the shape on the nave in small icons. On the large icon there are already something like that so one can guess the roundish and prolonged shape of the nave. In small icons those lines are not visible and so the nave looks plane and lacks life (unlike the sails).
Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 49 Location: Colorado, USA
Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 10:08 am Post subject: Re: small icons
bezvardis wrote:
Ahoi there! I wanted to share my opinion about the new icons. I have followed this discussion with great interest because the old icon really looked sad to me. The new version is much better. The large one seems just perfect. However, looking at the small ones I keep on thinking that something is missing there. The nave (is this the English word for the body of a ship?) seems not right. There is something missing that would give a sense of shape. I would suggest to put some accented lines that would stress the shape on the nave in small icons. On the large icon there are already something like that so one can guess the roundish and prolonged shape of the nave. In small icons those lines are not visible and so the nave looks plane and lacks life (unlike the sails).
You're quite right - Smokey and I didn't make any effort to improve the smaller icons. For the multiple sizes of the aqua-style icon, we just allowed Icon Composer to make smaller downsamples of the original 128x128 pixel icon. And for the document icons, I expect that Smokey simply used Photoshop to resize the ship image I gave him.
By the way, the word is "hull".
When I look at the document icons, I can see what you're talking about, but to me really the ship looks pretty solid. What you're seeing is that the regions of different colour which give cues about the surface shape are so small in the smaller icons that the cues are no longer strong enough. Yeah, it could be improved, but I don't think we'll bother.
Here's something to remember: I did the artwork as an "update" to the original ship from the 16th century engraving. That original ship is Very Weird Indeed, when you look at it closely! There's no deck, the masts aren't parallel, the hull is too tall and not long enough, etc, etc. I simply painted over it, because I wanted to retain some of its whimsical weirdness. That means that the realism of the ship doesn't stand up to keen inspection. So, if it looks a little flat, I'm not worried.
Maybe when it's time for 2.0, I or someone else will come up with a new round of artwork, for an even-more-updated look.
I don't think I or Smokey are planning to do any more work for 1.1. Can we regard it as WILLNOTFIX?
Can you live with it? Me, I have to live with all the mistakes I (the artist) can see in my own work!
nave: the main part of a church; the place where the congregation sits. Derived from an old word for ship; in older churches the beams of the roof resembled the beams and timbers in the sides of a ship.
Where I did my undergrad, we actually had a chapel that was desinged to resemble a ship. 'Course they didn't teach Latin there, so all of that was lost on everyone except those of us who'd had Latin in high school
As for the document icons, there are a number of things I'd like to try and improve when/if I get the time. Among them is legibility/recognizability at the smaller sizes. But that's time permitting, of course--when I get a good swath of time and have pared down my backlog of work
So in the language of Bugzilla, not WONTFIXed but rather DEFERRED
When I was a student in Wellington New Zealand there was a pub with a bar done as the hold of a wooden ship. They had a stuffed parrot for a while... Yes we used to do the entire Monty Python parrot sketch each and every time we went in there
Joined: May 21, 2004 Posts: 19 Location: New Zealand
Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 10:51 am Post subject:
Now that's an idea
From another Kiwi that enjoys the Monty Python parrot skit.
Have a good Xmas everyone. _________________ Retired Mobile Kiwi.
G4. iBook with OSX Tiger & Neo Office.
I was just thinking, after the discussion earlier about what should be on the Neo/J ship's flag... now that the OpenOffice.org v2 splash screen competition is over and there's a winner, how about using that splash screen as the flag flying from the ship? I mean, it'd be so small and wavy that it'd be hard to tell what it was, but in a sense, that's the flag that Neo/J is sailing under (or will be, once we catch up with v2, but what the hell) - seems apt to me.
Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 49 Location: Colorado, USA
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 8:16 am Post subject:
yoxi wrote:
I was just thinking, after the discussion earlier about what should be on the Neo/J ship's flag... now that the OpenOffice.org v2 splash screen competition is over and there's a winner, how about using that splash screen as the flag flying from the ship? I mean, it'd be so small and wavy that it'd be hard to tell what it was, but in a sense, that's the flag that Neo/J is sailing under (or will be, once we catch up with v2, but what the hell) - seems apt to me.
Early in my work on the current splash screen, I suggested to Patrick the idea of putting the OOo bird motif in the sky, like seagulls near the ship. His response was that he would be cautious about adopting any OOo artwork due to ownership issues and the chance of confusion. That may still be the case now, even for those tiny flags.
Yeah, fair do's - I also had a closer look at the splash screen [ed. i.e. Neo/J's] since then and noticed how blue the background is - so a blue flag would fade away into the yonderness...
- yoxi
Last edited by yoxi on Fri Feb 25, 2005 8:43 am; edited 1 time in total
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