Help needed with designing Haiku icons

Software Native
1

Hello!

As you may know I am porting the ACE Amstrad CPC emulator to Haiku.

I am currently working on “acepansions”, that is, add-ons emulating various peripherals for the Amstrad CPC computer. Each of these need an icon. I am not so skilled to draw all of them myselves, so I could do with a little help.

Here is a list of the needed icons:

  • “Phasers” / Light Guns. I didn’t want to put a too realistic gun there, so I went for something in between a “soaker” water gun and a sci-fi laser gun. However, I think the outline is a bit wrong and does not fit well with the other icons (and the handle has a larger outline somehow). Colors and shapes can probably be improved as well.


https://pulkomandy.tk/drop/phaser-gun

  • X-Mass is a mass storage device. I could simply use the hard disk icon from Haiku but surely there is some wordplay to do with the name?
  • Dandanator is a system for connecting expansion cartridges like on a gaming console: Le Dandanator Entertainment System – AUA I am not sure what to do as an icon for it.
  • MultiPlay is an interface for adding multiple joysticks and mouses. I guess I can mash the Joystick and Mouse preference icons together?
  • Willy is a soundcard system. I guess an orca would be an apropriate icon, because the name is a wordplay on another soundcard for the Amiga, called Flipper (like the dolphin in that movie), and so it is named like the orca in that other movie.
  • PlayCity is another soundcard
  • Amdrum is another sound device and probably some kind of drum or drumset would make a great icon for it
  • There are 3 different speech synthetizers, which could probably share the same icon
  • The Mirage Imager is a tool to create snapshots of running programs and save them to disk.
  • The cycle counter is a tool to measure how much time is spent in functions in the emulated code.

So, if you want to draw some icons and this gives you some ideas, I welcome your contributions and improvements. Thanks for your help! :smiley:

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While commuting, I did a quick sketch of the idea that popped in my mind for the X-Mass storage device:

2023-03-02 17.24.01
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As the wordplay with christmas is pretty obvious, disguising a Haiku drive as a christmas present seemed like an obvious re-present-acion to me :smile:
The oranges do double duty, as christmas balls at first sight, and as the ACE icon once you recognize what they really are. Take that, with regards of reusing shapes :rofl:

The orca is a good idea, well, I think it can’t be any other way given the name origin that you mentioned.
I’ll just do it with orange headphones on, to indicate the sound device.

Playcity… a building or two with orange headphones?

The Dandanator, I imagine the device itself alone, the device connected to the ACE orange, or the ACE orange with a slot, all with one or two cartriges on the side.

Let’s see what else comes to mind with more time.

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Just a quick update to show some of the progress until now, and also to ask for opinion and feedback:

ACEpansions 01
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ACEpansions at 20px 01

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These are lovely!

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How about for X-Mass,use the hard disk with an X on it? Or the word “X” on top and “Mass” below the X?:thinking:

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Mmm, I think I prefer it “text-less”. “X-mass” doesn’t transmits much to non-English speakers (not at least on my part of the world).

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Thanks for working on these :slight_smile: they’re great :smiley:

I don’t know if the orange/grapefruit needs to be in all icons? They will be installed inside the ACE directory, so there isn’t really a need to remind of the app main icon?

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Thank you all for the appreciation :smiling_face:

Hah, I should have asked for feedback earlier, I was even starting to include the grapefruit floating in the water below the orca :man_facepalming::sweat_smile:

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I’ll rework them a bit, let’s see what can be done :slightly_smiling_face:

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