Hi Michael,
> Personally I didn't take that from his response. There's a difference
> between being innovative and having a unique style.
Yes there is. I sort of mean both. Certainly Be's icons had/have a
unique style. They were also innovative within the field.
I didn't reply to this whole matter earlier, but I think this is simply
not
true. The Be icons look very familiar to the MacOS icons of the time. In
fact, the only difference seems to be the angle of the right side
perspective. This is attested by the various icon collection ports that
are
(sometimes still) available on BeBits. There used to be a rather large and
useful "ported from Mac" icons collection, which I have unfortunately lost
from all backups.
>> While this is certainly not the place for an extensive debate on
>> pictogram
> design (icon is actually being incorrectly >used in this context) there
> is
> no need to be defeatist.
>
> Actually I believe this has been the point of the contest and the
> existing
> discussions. I believe the only defeatism is if we don't come up with
> guidelines because we haven't come up with something that smacks us in
> the
> head as being innovative.
I wasn't trying to create guidelines. I was trying to suggest and
encourage. I mean - you could take any one of the icons from the
submitted sets and substitute it with any of the same type of icon from
any of the other sets (i.e. replace stippi's "People" icon with any
other "People" icon) and it wouldn't look out of place. That is a huge
clue that the sets are all pretty much the same.
I'm sorry I have to say that, but IMHO this is a at least a little
ignorant.
As long as you keep your idea of "innovative" vague, you might say
something
like this, but below, you give some examples of what you would call
innovative, and then I don't accept this above statement anymore. :-)
2D icons with a little thickness (think suncatchers lying on a table)
Photo realistic icons, possibly modified with some effect (solarized?)
Darker color schemes, to be not quite so cartoon-like
More pastel colors instead of vivid
Framed icons with faux-3d symbols bursting through the middle
All of these are not the least more "innovative" than any of the submitted
sets. Provided you accept the fact that the icons from the sets are not
interchangeable as you say.
Animated icons are interesting, but space concerns...
Rotating 3d models of icons (!!!)
Maybe interesting, but besides probably using too much space and resources
while being displayed, you would *very* soon realize how irritating
something
like this on your desktop is. Rotating 3D icons would be like looking at
an
ant hill from the top, only all the ants look different, which is even
more
confusing. One could make it less stressful if only icons pointed at are
animated, or something like that, but then the whole idea which was the
innovation is lost. (Because we have 3D icons now, only they don't rotate
when you point at them.)
Overall... if you explore a new area, like computers and interfaces in the
80ies, it is easy to be "innovative". Most innovation then comes from the
fact that the underlaying technique becomes more powerful. Like switching
from 2 color icons to 4, 16 or 256 color icons. Since we have reached 32
bit
icons now, innovation in that area is not possible anymore.
It's like if you look at cars. At a certain level, they are just cars and
all
look alike. There are some restrictions to how you can design a car, or
you
cannot use it on any road. Yet it *is* possible to design truely beautiful
cars. Only, you can argue wether that is an innovative leap forward, or
just
another beautiful car. Art and taste are something that move forward and
evolve in a whole community of artists. One artist sees something in
another
artists work and builds upon it. This is *so* true once you dig deeper
into
the subject and look closer at a single artist life and circumstances and
what other artists (which might not be as famous) have influenced her/him.
So to sum up, I think this whole "innovation" criteria (while it sounds so
desirable and I'd love to be proven wrong) is not making any sense anymore
at
this point in history. Personally, I will be happy if each set in the
contest
shows some individual property that can be built upon, and if we have a
truely beautiful set of icons in the end.
Best regards,
-Stephan
