[ubuntu-art] Semi-spontaneous IRC Art Team Meeting

[volvoguy]

On 7/28/05, John <john at nosuitsit.com> wrote:

> Three quick questions
> 
> 1) Does this list include any Kubuntu users?

The official answer is.... maybe. :o) It's past my bedtime, so I may
not be thinking clearly, but I don't recall anyone introducing
themselves specifically as Kubuntu users.

Personally, I think that the "core" work we need to do - icons and
themes - should be of such high quality that all of the Ubuntu
branches will want to use them. I think Andrew's icons and the
Clearlooks theme could both easily be used in Gnome or KDE (or XFCE,
etc, for that matter).

One thing to also keep in mind is that part of our team goals is to
create an Ubuntu Artwork Repository along the lines of art.gnome.org.
I'm even talking to them about collaborating on website code and some
great ideas they have for building a SOAP backend for sharing artwork
between sites!

Now, I said all that to point out the fact that we're really a
multi-faceted team. If you like creating art that doesn't fit in with
the overall system graphics, don't worry - you'll be able to make your
work available to the public. There's even a great project called
"Open Clipart" (http://www.openclipart.org/) that would be a good
place to show off your artwork that doesn't fit into the whole OS GUI
thing.

> 2) To cover all bases, is there an easy way to convert icon formats. Is it
> easier to draw an svg icon and then convert to png or vice versa?
> Do people find it easier starting with say a 128x128 icon then working down in
> size or start with what you assume most will be using (32x32 ?) ?

Oops. Thanks for reminding me. I told Andrew I'd work on explaining
more about this topic on the wiki. I guess it's not bedtime for me
yet. :o)

There IS an easy way to convert icon formats! Andrew is designing all
the originals in Inkscape/SVG (which is probably the best method for
forward compatibility). One of the biggest tasks for us before Breezy
is to get all the SVG icons converted to all the various bitmap (PNG
actually) icon sizes that are used throughout the system. In it's most
basic form, this involves exporting to PNG from Inkscape and then
tweaking the pixels to look good at various sizes in the Gimp. From
there, we'll use a command line app called "pngcrush" to optimize and
minimize the file sizes as much as possible. While it may be a tedious
task, it's not a very difficult one.

Here's a snippet from one of Andrew's emails to get you started:

"If any of you are brisk with a bezier tool, groovy with their
gradients or popular with pushing pixels please let me know so we can
kick this Icon set into shape.. You can grab it from :
http://andy.fitzsimon.com.au/humility-icons.tar.bz2
Just extract to /usr/share/icons/  not ~/.icons  for more fun when you
next use gksudo'd  apps"


> 3) What is a full set of images for just one icon?
> Would this be 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, svg
> Are there matching colour depths?

You can take a peek at some existing icon sets in /usr/share/icons. In
Hoary for example, the gnome icon theme lists all these different
dimensions:

12x12  192x192  32x32  48x48  96x96        scalable
16x16  24x24    36x36  72x72

Color depth will be 24bit PNG (with lots of transparency) for all the icons.


Hey! I just wrote half the wiki page. hehe. :o)


-- 
Aaron

Ubuntu SVG Artwork - www.volvoguy.net/ubuntu
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Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. ~ G.K. Chesterton