I take advantage of this thread, the use of the LOD allows you to optimize icons for low resolutions, but the current design of IOM does not allow you to see what is being done, it would be necessary that the editing view does not processes this information, and apply this only to the previews;
Perhaps I’m going to express a controversial opinion, I think it would be nice to be able to have a second icon BEOS:MINI_ICON with a simplified design only for resolutions <24px, I believe that in this case we should renounce the axonometric projection and drawing the icon with a flat design.
The download link doesn’t work, but I tried it directly and the resulting circle is indistinguishable from the default one. Just this detail made the resulting hvif 8 bytes smaller.
Great!
The boundary for the outline is something I learnt the hard way, after having to shrink more than one icon in a fairly advanced state, with the corresponding loss in sharpness, and then having to modify a lot of the paths to regain it.
Oh, how I would have liked to find posts like yours before!
Thank you for them!
(Tried downloading it from Web+, also from Chrome in my Mac just to check, and it still didn’t work, but tried with Falkon and it downloaded just fine. Go figure.)
Thanks!
Now I can see that you also had the circle itself slightly bigger, aligned with the 32px grid.
In my tests from yesterday I just took the default circle path and aligned only the control handlers, that were pretty close to a 64px grid point:
… instead, by transforming the circle path to make the radius grow one pixel in the 32px grid as you do, the handlers that need to be aligned are already practically touching a grid point:
Yes, that’s inconvenient, I think it will be great to have a row of previews of all the various sizes used throughout the system, not just three, at the top or bottom of the editing view, that also acted as toggles to select the resolution you need to see to work on in the editing area.
Yes, the standard circle in IOM is 16x16 px (in the 32 px grid), rescaling it to 18x18 and “freezing” its shape does the job as well, to save a few seconds I prefer to have this shape and color down ready as they are useful in most designs
I have been working on a FFmpeg logo icon already.
Tried quickly slapping a mouse to see how that works to suggest the “GUI” concept.
Yeah, not very imaginative, I know, but maybe that sparks some idea?
I´m starting to think we should keep the mouse in the icon. It´s got the ffmpeg (commandline tool) logo and the mouse signaling that we are using a GUI, not the commandline. Does that make sense?
EDIT: I just read @Handmaus `s comment where he explains exactly this as his idea behind the logo
Thanks @BlueSky, yesterday I had a pretty exhausting day at work (arrived home past 1AM), and wasn’t able to respond until today.
This past days reworked the icon a bit, this is the last state of it:
I still have to give it a whirl or two, now that I’m seeing it with fresh eyes, the light part of the cord is a bit too present when in dark backgrounds at bigger sizes, and looks muddy in light backgrounds at small sizes.
Ah, BTW, I have discovered a trick that may be interesting to other icon creators:
It consists in dropping the icon file you’re working on in a new Launchbox pad to create a link there.
Then click in the link with the secondary mouse button,
contextual menu > Settings > Icon size.
It’s a bit cumbersome to change sizes, as there are no keyboard shortcuts to do it, but this way at least is possible to visualize the 20 and 24 px sizes (used in Deskbar most importantly) that aren’t available to see in Tracker, or any other place that I know of.
Also, it doesn’t update live every time you save a change, as Tracker does, LaunchBox needs to change size up or down to refresh the view. And you can’t view the icons against a dark background, (as you can, indeed, in Tracker, by invoking the Background add-on inside a window via Opt+Alt+B and selecting the image of your choice, there you have it, another trick ), LaunchBox is always light grey.
Oh well.
Nice work and nice tip, I’ll also leave one of mine: I’m used to open the icon I’m working on with diskprobe too, by opening the icon attribute I can see a preview of it and I usually set a size of 256 px to see how appears (saved changes are applied live), for lower resolutions I prefer the Magnify company, with its view locked where the mini icon preview is in IOM, so I can see especially if the outline is visible enough or is it just a blurry color
When you feel it’s ready please give us the file, or if you are comfortable with git and GitHub you can also add the icon to the rdef file (Icon-O-Matic has an export function for that).
), LaunchBox is always light grey.
