Call for icons

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moshe weitzman's picture

Hi all. I would love for someone out there to contribute six icons for this site. They would represent the node types in use here.

  • poll
  • event
  • story
  • wiki page
  • job
  • group

I need a small version which will go in each row on listings like on the tracker page. Also a larger version which will go at the front of every node title on the group home page.

If anyone can point me to freely available ones thats welcome as well.

Comments

been working on icons

yoroy's picture

Made some for panels and views:

http://drupal.org/node/179845
http://drupal.org/node/179690

I've also been working on generic black/white ones, those might be nice to use here:
http://www.yoroy.com/elders/drupal/icons/zwicons-16-overview.png

lovely

moshe weitzman's picture

the blue panels icons at http://drupal.org/files/issues/panels-icons-overview-071130.png are lovely. if you would consider making a few more based on the needs I described here that would be great. thanks for all your UI work.

Thanks, and will do!

yoroy's picture

I'll report back here when I have something to show. I'm having a lot of fun making these, glad to be of help.

bigger picture

moshe weitzman's picture

i should really say that the larger goal i am after is to distinguish between node types when listing them on group home pages and on more compact listings like the tracker pages. icon work is a part of this goal. i'd love ideas.

thanks.

Style

elv's picture

Do you expect the icons to be used outside of groups.drupal.org?
If so we could try to create generic, theme-agnostic icons that could integrate into any website. It's a good design exercise :)

yes

moshe weitzman's picture

please do create generic ones for everyone. makes perfect sense.

gif/png

elv's picture

I wonder what kind of images we should use. Do we need 1 bit transparency, as IE6 still can't render png's alpha channel?
It has a direct impact on the design. I don't know if there is an official rule for Drupal, but I guess it should look good in any common browser.

PNGs are more future compatible

modulist's picture

IE6 has been the barrier to PNG being universally accepted as a proper format for graphics. Since it's well on its way out, I wouldn't be concerned. The graphics will appear on a white background instead of an alpha channel. I think your tradeoff is in favor of the flexibility that PNGs provide.

@modulist

PNG8+alpha

elv's picture

There may be a way to degrade -not quite gratefully- by using 8bit PNG + 8bit alpha. The PNG keeps its 8 bit alpha, but the visible pixels are dithered to 8bits instead of 24. So in IE6 and below any pixel with at least 1% transparency will be invisible. The result is not always very nice, but for icons I think it's good enough.
As the background is invisible, the icons would work in any theme.

I've put a demo page here, try with IE6 and a good browser to see the difference.

As far as I know Photoshop can't generate them. You need Fireworks, and maybe other apps.
You can also use any PNG24+alpha and use a free utility called PngQuant.

These are icons sets I use a

klaasvw's picture

These are icons sets I use a lot:

Lullacons
Famfamfam Silk icons
List of high quality free icon sets

Commercial but very nice and cheap compared to other sites:
IconDrawer Classic pack

Drupal style

elv's picture

It would be nice to start a "Drupal icon collection" with these 6 ones. A reduced set like this means less work, which is good for a beginning ;)
Have lots of work today, but I'll try to post a mockup before the end of the week.

Morten also has a Drupal icons collection. The ones you need are not already there, of course, but they look good.

Also, do you think they should all the same color (Blue-ish?) or should we use different ones? Different colors would help scanning the list faster I think. But too many colors can be confusing too, epecially if you think we may have to create more icons like this for other section of drupal.org.

And the misc. folder in drupal install!

yoroy's picture

There are really old & ugly and actually plain wrong icons in there for the different forumthreads. (an envelope for a forum thread?)

I have talked with morten about his icons a bit. They are mostly thrown together from different free icon sets (silk and mini from famfamfam.com) and as such they are not really upgradable to larger sizes.

Again, I tried to come up with a simple black-and-white approach first. I don't think these are different enough from eachother yet though:

Only local images are allowed.

good idea

Gábor Hojtsy's picture

Indeed, it would be great to refresh the forum icon set in Drupal 6, so let me express my support. We definitely need icons we can license with Drupal (mini and silk are not applicable), but as you point out these icons are not yet different enough. The envelope metaphor is definitely not accurate for forums these days, and transitioning to the bubble metaphor here would be a good idea as far as I see.

I like them!

rickvug's picture

I agree with Gabor, new forum icons would be great improvement for Drupal 6. I you are up for the challenge (and glory) please open up an issue for the Drupal project on the drupal.org mothership.

To comment on the design, I like the direction of these but think that they look a bit to small and colorless for core, which needs icons that are fairly generic. This is not a knock - I think the icons are great and would work wonderfully on many sites that are looking for a certain color pallet. If you are looking for a co-consirator in creating icons for Drupal I suggest getting in contact with this fellow as he seems to have big plans for Drupal icons as well.

Let me know if you need any help with this outside of the icon itself.

Opened an issue for it

yoroy's picture

Worked on these some more and posted them here:
http://drupal.org/node/190773

Thanks for your feedback here, would be nice I you could do the same for the ones in the issue.

got sidetracked with the forum icons

yoroy's picture

I started a wiki collecting a lot of the icon work being done on drupal.org. I'm looking for Input on setting up a system and workflow for creating a Drupal specific icon project. There's a lot that should be discussed, comments are enabled on the wikipage: http://groups.drupal.org/node/7809.

If people can help with chopping this potentially huge thing up into manageble steps, and help prioritize, I'd love to hear about it.

Free collections of icons

crystal icons

moshe weitzman's picture

i found a huge, high quality set iof icons at http://www.everaldo.com/crystal/?action=preview. i can just use these, so no need for yoroy or others to expend more effort on this unless you really want to. i could use ideas about general formatting of each node type so they distinguish from each other.

Wow

starbow's picture

Wow, those are some pretty icons, and distributable under the GPL no less. Do you think there would be any chance of getting a subset of the crystal icons into Drupal 7? I spent forever pulling together a simple set of icons when I put together quick_admin_menu.

yes crystal icons are slick

yoroy's picture

A bit too slick to my personal preference, but they are good icons. But, it will be hard to design new variations of it because the layered source files are not available. I looked through the crystal icons and couldn't find suitable candidates for "wiki page" or "poll" for example.

Also, I'm not so certain about their effectiveness at the smallest 16x16 size. For example, I think they would look great as visual labels for the drupal /admin overview page, with icons for only the sections: content, building, configuration, users, logs. But icons for every option would be overkill, leading to visual clutter which would not be helpfull.

The bluecurve icons are available as layered illustrator files, but they are not as good as I expected after reading Modulist's comment below :) Bluecurve does show it's age a bit and it's 3D-ness is quite unconvincing at times. Maybe the sources could be used as building blocks for our own Drupal icon set.

So, about the icons that Moshe requested. I haven't made them yet in the blue-ish panels style as mentioned above. I tried to come up with a good metaphor that works at 16x16 black-and-white pixels first:

Only local images are allowed.

nice start

moshe weitzman's picture

i love them except for job. perhaps a shovel (i.e. manual labor) or a money metaphor. the event one is good although the exclamation point is a bit off IMO. how about a simple number (pick one from 1-9)?

thanks.

yoroy's picture

Problem with money is I didn't want to choose between £, $, ¥, € etc. I tried a helmet but couldn't get it to look right. Shovel might work actually!

With the event one I chose the exclamation point so I could keep the number for a more generic "calendar" icon. See the second-to-last "popular contrib" column in the big image below. I agree the "!" is not ideal though.

same thing

moshe weitzman's picture

IMO, calendar and event can and should share same icon.

BlueCurve: The mother lode of icons and source files

modulist's picture

Below is a link to the BlueCurve icons library, which the art team has developed for the RH user interface. It's a real masterpiece of open-source collaboration and we should link or give back any contributions we make to it. You can download a 40MB .zip with the source Illustrator files for the icon library.

Go to https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/bluecurve/ for a page listing all the components and documentation.

There are tight standards for setting up lighting and isometrics, but I think there are huge benefits to making our icons compatible with BlueCurve and following their lead.

Even if you don't use the BlueCurve icons as a foundation, the documentation and the files give you a terrific foundation and a roadmap for creating any desktop icons.

And for full disclosure, I've had no involvement with BlueCurve or the RedHat team :-)

@modulist

oh well, some more images then

yoroy's picture

All the small black and white ones I did so far:
Only local images are allowed.

A closer look at some of the blue ones:
Only local images are allowed.

These black and white icons

mfredrickson's picture

These black and white icons make me think of my Mac Plus from back in the day. Retro.

black/white

wmostrey's picture

I really love the black and white ones. Change the "job" content type with the hammer and things look really great!

test of 8bit alpha PNG icons

BrightLoudNoise's picture

I've done some test forum icons using Elv's 8bit alpha png technique, you can see them at http://brightloudnoise.com/imagedump/8bit_png_test/

Another forum icon theme I'm

BrightLoudNoise's picture

Another forum icon theme I'm working on, which has more traditional style, it also uses 8bit PNG's with alpha transparency, so it degrades pretty gracefully for older browsers (ie5.5, ie6).

my proposal

bloomaniac's picture

I created some forum icons too.
You can have a look at them here.

I've also been playing

konfuzed's picture

I've also been playing around with the new Oxygen set from the KDE4 guys, there are a lot of basic icons done well you can build off of there for a newer mac/kde feel if you'd like. I'll post some up when I'm done.

As for BlueCurve, they're nice, but a bit cartoony feeling. Seems to be the overall feeling and why Fedora replaced them as the theme set and just uses them as an icon set choice now too. But the idea and document for consistency are huge steps for any set of icons.


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