Artwork requests

Post by **Lucifer** » Sat Dec 04, 2004 1:59 am

Ok, there are a lot of great artists here, and I am not one of them, so I ask.

I have these two programs, pyAlarm and pyExtractor, that have shitty buttons because I drew them. (Ok, pyExtractor doesn't actually have any buttons yet) So pretty please, would someone out there who can actually draw good draw some buttons for me?

Here's a list of what I need: (Some are implemented already, some are planning for the future)

pyAlarm:
Application icon (Make it the same icon in 4 pngs, at 16x16, 24x24, 32x32, and 64x64, google for color limitations or I can provide them later)
Toolbar buttons (32x32, like a media player):
Play
Pause
Next
Previous
Snooze
Stop

And a really nice logo to use on the Help screen and in the installer.

I think that's it for pyAlarm.

pyExtractor:
Application Icon (same parameters as for pyAlarm)
Toolbar buttons (also 32x32, and mostly just like browser buttons):
Refresh
Stop
Back
Next

And a really nice logo to use on the Help screen and in the installer.

All graphics need to be PNGs. I can convert them from there to any format I need. In fact, I use a program img2py that converts png graphics to python source code so I don't have to deal with distributing the raw PNGs. I have another program (I forget what it's called, I have to google it everytime I use it) that converts 4 PNGs to a WIndows .ico file. But I store the masters as PNGs (they're in CVS too).

Thanks in advance!

iceman · Post by **iceman** » Sat Dec 04, 2004 9:42 pm

here >> http://www.freewebtemplates.com/graphics.php?id=20 << you will find a whole load of free online buttons

Post by **Lucifer** » Sat Dec 04, 2004 11:47 pm

iceman wrote:here >> http://www.freewebtemplates.com/graphics.php?id=20 << you will find a whole load of free online buttons

That's a cool site iceman. I didn't look far enough to see what the licenses are for the graphics, because I did a cursory glance.

All of what I saw looked designed for web pages, which is surprisingly different from regular standalone programs. I'll look deeper, but I do have license requirements. The graphics have to be under a GPL-compatible license, or just plain GPL. The program is GPL. (Of course, since I wrote it and there are no outside contributions yet, I can still change the license without difficulty, but I'm not going to)

I found several huge icon repositories, but sadly all of the icons offered were not GPL-compatible. Most of them had clauses about "no commercial use". It's a big problem for open source projects to use stuff that's free, but no commercial use. That means a commercial Linux distribution, for example, wouldn't be able to package my program, and I'd like to see my program on the next iteration of Mandrake or whatever, if I could.

I even looked at a few of the sites for the contributors, and the license terms if you actually buy an icon set from them still prevent usage in open source software.

I did find some icons that work and are much better than I could ever draw looking in /usr/share/icons.

Presumably those icons are completely compatible with my license since they came with Mandrake, but Mandrake has a habit of limiting what you can do with their own art, so I have to be careful not to use any art made by Mandrake directly. I'll probably satisfy my needs with these, but I would still prefer custom icons made specifically for the program, that's always best I think.

root down · Post by **root down** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 1:54 am

i need more specifics
how big do you want the logo for the help page? banner? fullpage?
do you want it dark, light, clean, grunge, etc
what colour are the apps? or what colour do you want them to be?

iceman · Post by **iceman** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 2:47 am

could you post a screen shot of your app w.i.p.
i think that would help root 100%

Post by **Lucifer** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 2:53 am

root down wrote:i need more specifics
how big do you want the logo for the help page? banner? fullpage?
do you want it dark, light, clean, grunge, etc
what colour are the apps? or what colour do you want them to be?

Edit: I just released a new windows build of pyAlarm using the new iconset I got from KDE. There's a logo in the help screen that should give you an idea what I'm wanting. The logo looks *really* bad. Sorry, I'm not much of an artist. It only looks arguably better in Linux. Heh. Anyway, the iconset is pretty generic. It's the best I found in KDE, and it'll do. I'd like to have something better, especially the application icon, but I'm now happy with the icons I have. The logo, though, needs serious work. If you just want to screw with the icons that are there, there are some PNGs installed in $INSTDIR/pyAlarm/graphics that are the entire iconset, including the GIMP file for the logo. On Linux that'll be /usr/share/pyAlarm, typically. On Windows, by default, it's c:\\Program Files\pyAlarm. http://pyalarm.sourceforge.net/

Ok, an application icon that is a neat-looking alarm clock (possibly with a snake worked into it, since it is the Python Alarm Clock) with some fancy embossed-looking text to the right that says "pyAlarm". Ideally you'd send me a huge TIFF of the thing, or a GIMP file, and I can rescale it to whatever size I need. So it's a banner, I guess.

I want it looking like metal. Like a hammer that beats you in the morning to wake you up. And bright shiny light, like the sun reflecting off of said hammer. In any case, the logo should make you think of waking up, rather than going to sleep.

Not sure what you mean by what color are the apps? They're whatever color the user has made them. I'm a firm believer in letting the user's preferences for look override mine, so I use color macros that use system colors that can be modified by system-wide settings.

There's a new Linux release for pyAlarm that has a new set of icons I found by digging up from KDE's icons directory. I'm going to reboot soon and build a new Windows distribution so you can see. There's at least an icon that can serve as placeholders everywhere there's supposed to be a graphic.

For the pyExtractor, I actually really really like the icon I found for it. It's in the newest version of that, if you want to download it and look at it. It's an eyeball on a neat-looking background. So variations of the eye are definitely called for, but an eye should be the symbol for the pyExtractor. No snakes this time. Heh. A banner logo similar to the pyAlarm logo with the application icon on the left and the application name on the right. No ideas about what it should look like. You might want to read the webpage about what it does and even run it a few times if you're looking for inspiration based on that. It might be cool to have a little ninja on the right-hand side, next to the text.

Post by **Lucifer** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 10:38 am

iceman wrote:could you post a screen shot of your app w.i.p.
i think that would help root 100%

Screenshots here

They haven't yet been updated for the new version, so the About dialog isn't in there. There's also a pause button in the new version. The application icon can be clearly seen in the upper-right-hand corner of the window. That's also put in the application menu, on the taskbar, and when you browse to it. It's also used for the installer icon.

Edit: updated screenshots link. Put up new screenshots.

root down · Post by **root down** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 5:11 pm

that helps a billion, thanks alot.
everything i design will be designed to look good with THAT colour scheme. however, i plan on making the button's fairly neutral toned, so i'd imagine they'd look good in any situation. as for the banner, i don't have any ideas yet, but if i get one you'll be seeing it.

root down · Post by **root down** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 5:18 pm

wait, i've confused myself again....on the screenshots it looks like you HAVE toolbar buttons, at least for stop and play. do you want more in that style?
when you said buttons you threw me off, i was thinking you wanted outlines as well, and 32x32 seemed kinda small.

Post by **Lucifer** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 6:45 pm

root down wrote:wait, i've confused myself again....on the screenshots it looks like you HAVE toolbar buttons, at least for stop and play. do you want more in that style?
when you said buttons you threw me off, i was thinking you wanted outlines as well, and 32x32 seemed kinda small.

I meant "icons", sorry. I have icons for the toolbar that are "acceptable", not "great" or "beautiful" or "wonderful".

No outlines, just the middle part that shows what the icon does, the platform's native widgets will make the outlines. Also, the background needs to be transparent. Or black. Either one.

(I can have my conversion script turn black easily into transparent) Or white. In fact, if you don't use an alpha channel, you should give me the hex color of the thing, you know, like #ffeeaa or whatever. Anyway, they're toolbar icons I'm needing. I definitely still need a good Snooze icon. The old one looked like the Amiga's sleeping mouse pointer, the new one looks much better but doesn't make sense as a snooze button, so I have "looks good" instead of "is useful" now.

Toolbar icons are usually 16x16 actually. I prefer smaller toolbars with 32x32 icons and just fewer icons, like your web browser has. A toolbar gets pretty worthless when you spend more time trying to decipher little graphics than actually working. Most applications I use the menus instead of the toolbar. When the alarm goes off and I'm just barely waking up, I need to be able to find the right buttons quickly.

(It used to be a window that popped up and the button occupied a HUGE space) If you put it in a vectored format that the GIMP can read, then you don't have to worry about resolution.

Future growth of the program is going to call for a complete matching set of media button icons. So previous, next, play, pause, and stop all have to be represented. Snooze because it's an alarm clock.

The pyExtractor calls for back, forward, refresh, and stop, just like a web browser. In fact, I stole a Konqueror icon for what I'm using right now. I really don't like any of the icons I've seen for these in any web browsers.

But man is that logo trash or what? Heh. I swear it looked good in the GIMP before I stuck it in the program. Really! I was all impressed with it, too! Argh.

root down · Post by **root down** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 6:50 pm

do you have instant messaging or something, it would make this alot easier

root down · Post by **root down** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 8:06 pm

ok, first toolbar button attempt...
edi - they're in the zip. those 2 are a preview of the style.
also, i found it difficult to get fancy seeing as i'm working on a 32x32 canvas
edit2 - i also made refresh, just now, and it's not in the rar, so make sure to save it from here
edit3 - refresh looks ****** dumb, oh well

root down · Post by **root down** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 8:49 pm

tell me if i'm on the right track with this one
also, pointer as to what kind of effects you'd prefer, ie. backgrounds is you want one, borders, typeset if you have a preference, colours of the eye and the text, whatever.

Post by **Lucifer** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 9:49 am

Root: Champions was full when I grabbed the screenshot so I posted here instead so I wouldn't forget.

http://www.davefancella.com/pyalarm10.png

So the background transparency isn't coming through. Now, I had this problem with the last set of icons, where the background was coming through black. So I set the script doing the conversion to turn black into transparency and that corrected the problem. With these buttons I wasn't able to do quite the right trick on them.

A suggestion also, the icons that are there add an alpha channel to pixels on the edges of the buttons, which is what gives them the smooth fade. Or at least, that's the way it looked when I opened them in the GIMP. Heh.

root down · Post by **root down** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 10:35 am

banner #2