New Xion Icons - Preview

[Lance]

A few people have suggested having icons for specific file types. I've spent a bit of time putting together a pack. I'm hoping they please most people seen as they're more traditional.

I only added colors for the most used types, everything else is grey unless you have suggestions for colors and stuff. Small adjustments will probably be made anyway (like a more distinct shadow for the page curl).

But for now, yay?

[logokas]

Brilliant work!

Nice to see some new stuff popping up.

[Cliff Cawley]

Nice work Lance!

The only 2 Icons I see missing, are for Plugins and Skins!

Cliff

[Lance]

Cheers guys!

Haha aye Cliff I'm aware! I've made some tweaks anyway, saved some .ico versions and saw them in action on real files. Just fine tuning edges and stuff now. Glad you like though!

[Lance]

Quick update. Here's the 48x48 versions with a folder mockup. (I used actual folders for quickness):



...and on a dark background incase you were wondering:

[Lance]

Aight last one for tonight. Quick draft of the skin and plugin icons. Obviously a WIP but you get the idea.



Think I'll rework the colors for everything a bit, not sure I like having blank for skins and plugins. Feedback appreciated!

[Lance]

After a good sleep, I've noticed a few things I'm not keen on. Firstly, too much color and a lot of bluriness. I'm remaking them again and redrawing each size specifically (as you're supposed to). I'm gonna take the color out of the X too so it's easier to distinguish the file type. Basically just make stuff sharper.

Any opinions on what color an mp3 should be? Yellow/orange would suit the logo of course but I dono, I always fancied blue or green for general mp3s.

[SLoB]

One of the bug bears I have with MS with both Vista and Win7 and most likely other future OS's lol is WTF don't they just use 1 Vector version size of an icon and rescale it on the fly and cache the various sizes? i.e. make the largest size and the system does the rest.

Surely that makes so much sense in cutting down work going forward?

It's content that takes more time than anything else and things should be getting quicker to push out.

Ooops mini rant over lol

PS. Nice work Lance The tops of the icons could do with being sharp, just one grey line.

[Lance]

Haha. Thanks slob. You kinda contradicted your entire post with that last line though, auto scaling = blury anti-aliased mush. Small stuff should be drawn pixel for pixel.

Anyways yeah I'll have version 2 coming up soon, much sharper stuff

[SLoB]

Well yea lance, it's not ideal but the gist of it to reduce the work needed rather than increasing seems the best way forward imo
I agree with the pixel by pixel for small icons (we all live and breath pixels ), however if the shift was to move away from smaller icons to larger esp as things are moving to touch screens, larger selection areas etc... then it has to make sense to let the system handle the resizing from single vectors rather than bitmaps.
It could be simplified so much and reduce content for smaller OS footprints etc...
Also fonts could be coded in such a way as you don't need the fonts taking up so much space, they could be just styled from a single character file (kinda thing).
The main onus is on creating a faster OS and reducing all the bloat. Remember 16k games/programs anyone? heheh

[Lance]

Aye mate I feel you on all that. Resolutions and PPI's are only ever gonna get bigger anyways, and with iphones retina display tech, hell we probabaly won't ever have to hand draw pixels again if theyre gonna be physically that small in the future! Imagine the smallest icon we create is 1000x1000 and it appears as 1/4 inch on a screen. Heavenly...

[Lance]

Update!

Finally finished the hand-drawn versions. There was just too much going on before, I much prefer the simpler look and less intrusive logo. Tried to keep them as sharp and clear as possible. Hope you like em...

Tedius task of making all the rest now. Lemme know I have your approval before I start though, way too much work to change something once I start!

Btw, yay for blue mp3s? Yellow just wasn't kicking it for me personally. Website header won't be yellow forever



EDIT: I gotta fix up the consistancy of the outer strokes. I'm on it no worries.

[Lance]

See previous post first.

OK I'm personally set on a few colors I have in mind.

.mp3- Blue (just feels like a nice common color to use)

.wav - Red/pink (uncompressed audio, serious business, nothing says serious like red)

.wma - Aqua (aqua feels very microsoft to me, takes me back to windows 95 with an aqua colored desktop wallpaper and beige computer case...)

.m4a - Purple (purple feels itunes/mac-ish to me, blue moreso but a nice desaturated purple looks good with it too)

.ogg - Green (compressed audio format leaving mp3 in the dust, reaching potential bitrates of up to 1000kbps vs the 320 limit of mp3s. The future is bright, the future is green)

.flac - Red/orange (like wav, nothing says badass lossless like a shade of red)

Other colors will then be based around the above with slight shade variations, depending on which they match closest to in format. I've put a fair bit of thought into this but as always, feedback and opinions welcome!...

[Cliff Cawley]

Man, I was loving the original icons you did, but now when I flick between the two, I think I'm liking the pure and clean ones more! Fantastic work mate!

The colours you've chosen sound great to me, but what do I know, I'm just a programmer

Even though I have the flu atm, I've definitely got extra drool after checking these out!

Cliff

[Lance]

Thanks Cliff!

Aight guys I'm going ahead with these...I'll post a full preview soon.