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searched for "save" .. ten pages of variations on the 3.5" diskette icon all labeled "floppy" even though diskettes aren't floppy. I wonder when a new save icon will emerge?
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> It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community. You would be surprised how helpful it is to simply offer design insights for free. A lot of projects are maintainted by programmers who have zero design notions and who are not even aware of the little things. Offering a free mockup to an open-source project is also very valuable.
For example: https://github.com/pugjs/pug/issues/2189 Jade had to rename. They picked 'Pug' and needed a logo. christopherdowson asks if anyone can propose a logo and ends up creating the final logo. Pretty neat thread IMO.
Typefaces are exempt from copyright in most countries AFAIK. Only the actual font file ("computer program") and name (trademark) are restricted.
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> It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community. You would be surprised how helpful it is to simply offer design insights for free. A lot of projects are maintainted by programmers who have zero design notions and who are not even aware of the little things. Offering a free mockup to an open-source project is also very valuable.
I've tried with mixed results. Some OS projects have been super grateful for tiny things such as favicons and logo vectorisation, but in my experience most tend to acknowledge but not implement work sent on spec. After a quick search I've just discovered opensourcedesign.net which I'll definitely look at contributing to. This would be great for designers portfolios http://opensourcedesign.net/jobs
So the tendency ends up being that a lot of projects just stay small and go out of their way not to grow, even when they address a problem that demands more scope than they have.
My suggestion given all of that is to not give up, but focus your design energies on the inspirational: if you produce mockups and prototypes that are hugely compelling, someone will come out of the woodwork to realize some of them: you may not know which ones or when, but you're giving them footholds in approaching the problem.
They even have icons for "Fuck", e.g. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=Fuck&i=54850 Iconic karma sutra here: https://thenounproject.com/term/sex/
I put up a couple of hundred icons that I'd drawn previously up with a public domain license. Here are the download counts and royalties from the last 10 months for reference: http://i.imgur.com/clNZWUk.png
How does this work when you purchase a royalty free license and then use it in an open source project?
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I did a workup of the iphone with no icons and just text: http://justinvincent.com/page/2387/if-the-iphone-used-text-l... It shows just how stark an interface can look without them.
As a counterpoint, here are Zendesk's icons with no text: http://imgur.com/a/wzCO0 -- can you guess what those do? Of course, this is about the worst example of iconography I've ever seen so here's the same with the labels left in: http://imgur.com/a/CyqA6 and I'd even go so far as to suggest that given their choice of icons they should just get rid of them and make it text-only.
I think $40/yr or $2/icon is too far out of reach for me to use these icons as a proof of concept, blog, or early website launches. I have a website idea which would use about 100 of these icons, but I can't justify the cost yet since it brings in no revenue.
Little pictograms for buttons are often extremely vague and open to interpretation. Eg. Heres a random game where upon opening it I was immediately confused http://mobile.cdn.softpedia.com/apk/images/color-switch_1.jp... (also the icons are all animated / rotating, making it even more confusing, made this game menu stick out in my memory as an egregious example) Some designers seems to love the minimalism of if thoug…
Icons and text are exactly the same thing. They're both language; visual forms that mean something. We're more used to text, because text has a lot of nice properties as a medium for language so it has become pervasive. It's generally low dimensional and has high composability. For low bandwidth mediums it's ideal, because it's also low bandwidth. But that doesn't mean icons aren't a language and aren't just as usefu…
Nope. Icons are direct visual analogs of the things represented. There's just one layer of abstraction: thing -> picture of thing. An icon, at least in principle, looks like the thing represented (or at least like some important property of it).
That's feasible for "save" or "center the text", but starts to get pretty damned hard when it's something like "Earl Warren's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education".
Western text, by contrast, is a visual representation of the phonemes in the verbal representation of the thing.
Thing -> audio of word representing thing -> phonemes making up that word -> text.
There are at least two more layers of abstraction involved, with all the additional power that implies. The word "horse" has virtually nothing in common with a physical horse.
Another important difference: a literate person can immediately write down any word that can be spoken, and any other literate person (who has learned that same character set) can immediately reproduce the original spoken word.
(I'm assuming, arguendo, that we're using the IPA alphabet or some other character set that tries to cover all the world's phonemes in an unambiguous manner).
Icons, by contrast, have to be designed. Good ones take a lot of thought and artistic skill to create, and even then they are notoriously prone to misinterpretation or outright user bafflement.
'Text can be just as bad. Imagine reading "subtract b from a and divide that result by q" versus "(a - b) / q". The latter is a more efficient language which most everyone will understand. Better to use the latter.'
The latter is still text. It's just using a different written language. It is a compact representation of "subtract the second thing from the first thing and divide the result by the third thing". How on earth could you represent that using icons? It seems like it would be quite a challenge.
I would be using this service if they offer all possible resolutions with one click. I assume this is service which should be used by non-designers to quickly get icons for some proof of concept or similar. Am I missing something?