[openbeos] Re: Icon Design Contest

Stephan Assmus wrote: 
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.

The first version of BeOS that I played with was DR8 which came out before MacOS8. I would certainly say that there was a lot of cross- pollination between the groups.

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. :-)

Innovative means creating something different. I think that redrawing basically the same thing that we have had since 1991 is not innovative. The vector work that you did is innovative, in that I have not seen any vector format that does so much in so little space.

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.

I agree that these aren't particularly innovative ideas. What they are is something different. I was trying to point out the fallacy of the statement that there are only a few ways to make icons.

As far as the interchangeability - I may be the only one who sees it that way. I certainly haven't heard the roar of agreement that I might hope for. :-)

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.)

Agreed. Much like the throbbing icons that OSX uses. I did note that I am not an artist and I did warn that the ideas might not be useful. My only point is that people shouldn't think in such a box. I think that it would be sort of sad if, on bootup, you couldn't tell the difference between our desktop and Gnome or KDE or OSX.

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. 

Agreed.

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. 

True, too, although there are sometimes more radical shifts.

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.

That would be enough, I agree. I am hoping for more than enough. I am hoping for something that could be immediately identifiable. Window tabs, for example. Many people on the early dev lists complained about the tabs, arguing for Windows style bars. That may sound ridiculous to us now, but still it happened that way. And those tabs are sort of the "hallmark" of BeOS. I think that an icon set could be the same kind of
thing, if someone can come up with something different enough. I would like to see some different thinking in icons. But, yes, vectorized BeOS/ Gnome/KDE/OSX icons would be adequate.

IN fact, take a look at http://art.gnome.com/themes/icon
There are some interesting ideas in there that are worth consideration or at least notice.

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