Fire Development

As stated, the previous posts icons were just an initial test and shouldn’t have been considered indicative of what might else could come from the rumblings of well, wherever icons are borne at.

Anyways, here is a subset of a vastly different variation I had been working on. This follows the “slate” style popularised by OmniGroup, rather than the glassy that is rather touchy

For the add and remove buttons, it should be noted that even Apple is inconsistent in their presentation. Compare Finder’s white + with glow to Page’s green blob and white +. I opted to go with Page’s look. There are several variations on some of these, included a radically different approach to groups and buddy priority and buddy language. The main goal of this set of icons was to completely rid the set of the actual icon for a buddy wherever possible. With this set, an icon similar to OmniWeb’s web history would be used for chat history.

Again, comments appreciated.

I have begun work on a number of new icons for the 2.0 release. We’ve been using Blake’s old icons since just after the initial non-beta release of OS X (dunno where Eric got the original). While they are excellent, as OS X evolves so does its interface, and I felt its time we change some things UI wise.

My goals are thus:
- an evaluation of all visuals used in Fire. Do they do what they visualise? are they too complex? How can the fundamental (as opposed to the representational) design of the icon by simplified?
- a complete update of the representation of all designs in use in Fire. We’re going to make ‘em pretty and clean
- a complete update of all emoticons (including service specific) to a single style. Sorry, I hate those old ones.
- resolution independence. Right now a number of icons were designed at the pixel level. With the rumours of 10.5 being resolution independent, even if for now we include the icons as a TIFF, they will be designed with much larger sizes in mind. For those who care, Fire already supports PDF as an appropriate file type for FireBrand, and it successfully displays them.

Along that lines I present some of the initial work in this. As you can see in the image included, the icons are fully scalable (they’re created with OmniGraffle for those who care). The smilies look distinguishable completely down to about 11 or 12px, and then they get a bit hard to distinguish, but, good luck making much of anything distinguishable at that size (the most basic smile, with one pixel face border, one pixel between the edge and the eyes, one pixel for the eyes, one pixel for the nose, one of the height of the mouth, one between the mouth and the chin, and one more for the edge is eight. A “grinning” face requires a minimum of 3 pixels for the mouth, but that leaves no room for eye distinction, etc. Plus we have a slight drop shadow too).

Thus far, at least, I’m keeping up with the general old presentation of the icons, but that’s because they were the most classic and basic. You can bet I won’t be putting lots of icons into icons into other icons like has been done of late. They look better with a unified toolbar look, which has already been updated in the Fire Source by graham.

Comments are encouraged.