As some of you may have noticed by now, OSAlert has started using icons from the Tango Project to replace many of our old icons. You can spot the new icons conveniently on the topic page. In the Tango icon library we have found numerous icons we could use, but understandably, Tango was not made for OSAlert: we cannot replace all the icons we want with Tango icons – yet. And this is where you come into play. So, read on for the rationale behind choosing the Tango icon set, and how you can help us – and win a subscription to our ad-free version!OSAlert has 78 news categories, each of which has its very own icon. Most of them are logos from companies, projects, operating systems, you name it. Some of them, however, are ‘general purpose’ categories, and they cannot use a specific logo. They need general icons. Since many of those general icons had a nineties feel to it, we decided a ‘modernification’ was in order – especially seeing version 4 of OSAlert is right around the corner.
The big problem with choosing icons for your website has to do with copyright and licenses. Many of the good icons you find online are ‘free for personal use’, which obviously excludes them from use on websites like OSAlert. Even CC-licensed material is often unusable for OSAlert, since they regularly include the ‘non-commercial’ clause – and OSAlert might be a voluntary effort, but we are still a commercial endeavor.
After browsing the internet for a long time, we narrowed our choice down to either the Tango Project’s icon set, KDE’s new Oxygen icon set, or Fedora’s new Echo icon set. Oxygen turned out not to be an option, seeing they use the CC license with the ‘non-commercial’ clause, so Echo and Tango remained; Tango was chosen because we concluded the Tango icons were easier to ‘read’ at 32×32 pixels.
We announced that we were going to use Tango icons on the Tango mailing list, and placed an attribution link at the bottom of OSAlert, and this way, we fulfilled the license requirements for using the Tango icons.
The contest
Now, as explained, the ‘stock’ Tango icons do not provide us with replacements for each of the icons we want to update. This is where you come in. We ask you to make us the icons we need, following the Tango icon guidelines and colour palette. These are the icons that need updating:
The rules are as follows:
- Create icons for any or all of the categories as shown above, following the Tango guidelines and colour palette.
- Send them to OSAlert in 32×32 GIF format. Make sure to use as much of that space as possible, so that the icons ‘touch’ the edges of the little boxes OSAlert draws around them.
- You can publish your icons wherever you want, but only icons licensed under the same CC license as the other Tango icons are eligible (alternatively, you can make your icons public domain). You can, of course, also donate them to the Tango Project.
- Allow OSAlert to use your icons without having to add yet another attribution link at the bottom of OSAlert – basically, give us a written exemption of the attribution part of the CC license.
We will announce the winners in a follow-up story, where we will give full attribution to you, the author (to compensate for rule #4). As said, the winners will receive a life-long subscription to OSAlert (ad-free, fast-loading version of OSAlert). So, fire up your favourite vector drawing tool, and get drawing!
Topic icons from left to right:
Gifts, Competitions, Easter Eggs
Databases
Bugs & Viruses
3D News, GL, DirectX
Law and Order
Multimedia, AV
Talk, Rumors, X Versus Y
Benchmarks
In the News
I’m surprised that there are no Tango icons for databases, multimedia or news.
Would you organize a contest for the best device driver coding? No. So why asking for tens of people to create icons, spend their time and throw away 90% of them? You will say “If you don’t want to participate, don’t“. Ok, but still. The open-source community is complaining that open-source application look like crap, yet you always consider graphic designers as idiots. If you want a good job in graphic design for the open-source, contract a professional designer, don’t rely of poor/stupid freelancers. Don’t be surprised if there are so few graphic designers interested in helping out or to give their free time. What about the “reward”? Isn’t this ridiculous? When the reward is so small, it’s better not to offer anything at all instead of insulting the guys. I mean, come on, are his hours or evenings of work worth only an OSN subscription? What about the others who “lost”? Screw them? I hope one day the open-source community will realize how they treat graphic designers and respect more their work. If I could draw these icons, I would definitely not help, for these reasons. Argh…This drives me so mad…!
>What about the others who “lost”? Screw them?
No, they simply lost. That’s what a COMPETITION means.
However, it would be possible to use DIFFERENT icons from DIFFERENT artists, in which case, they should all get a subscription.
>contract a professional designer
OSAlert is not News.com with millions in the bank.
No, they simply lost. That’s what a COMPETITION means.
This is why it’s just plain wrong to do it. This is like considering graphic design as just a poor job that is only worth…A contest. Like on an assembly line: Produce in mass and throw away all that doesn’t meet the quality requirements. The difference is that graphic design is done by human beings, during their free time, and their time is as valuable as yours, so is their work.
Are you being intentionally dense?
Whats your point? OSS code is written by human beings in their free time. This contest is no different from other ones, including code contests. Some have expensive prices, some don’t. That’s why you can, you know, *choose* which ones to enter.
Don’t want to “waste” your free time? DONT ENTER.
It’s not rocket science.
I can see why you’re doing it, to save money. I can understand that. At the end of the day it has to come out of someone’s pocket and I don’t see anyone here opening their wallet.
As an alternative if this ‘competition’ doesn’t work out, you could find some to-buy icons/icon sets and then see if the community would be willing to donate to purchase them?
There’s plenty of freebies on the Internet anyways: http://www.freeiconsweb.com/
The entire Tango icon set has been made… For free. Without even ANY reward. So, what is your issue here? There are enough people out there who *enjoy* making icons (I am actually one of those, I am making my own iconset, but that one isn’t suitable for OSAlert), and are more than willing to do it for free.
In fact, I know enough graphic designers who would create those icons for OSAlert for free, just out of being nice. However, I chose to make a nice contest out of it, giving everybody an equal chance – even people I do not know.
I do it to be nice, but if you don’t appreciate that, fine. Just please don’t come off as an ass doing so.
This is actually the exact answer I expected. This is fine. No one wants to understand why there are so few people in the graphic design scene to join open-source projects. If you hang around on graphic design forums, you will understand what I mean. Most of the guys hate open-source software (except maybe Firefox) just because of the negative mindset of the open-source community towards them. The Tango and CrystalClear icon sets are the exceptions to the rule. If you take a peek at the KDE-Look and Gnome-Look web sites you’ll see that almost no artwork is done by graphic designers and therefore look like poop. But no one wants to admit it.
They did have programming related contests before, nobody is being discriminated… Hiring a professional to draw a handful of symbols is clearly overkill and the chances are actually very good that they’ll receive a decent set of icons. Heck the only reason I don’t try it myself for fun is, that I’m quite sure that someone else will submit a better effort.
when you put it that way, it’s hard not to feel bugged for the icon designers. Stuff like the tango project, everaldo’s work, and I’m sure the oxygen project (when we see it) is much, MUCH more than a handful of symbols.
I believe he was talking about the OSAlert Icons. I, too, believe it is kinda overkill to hire a professional to draw like 10 to 15 icons, just so the site will look a bit better ? Perhaps less than that…
It is like hiring a professional programmer to help you optimize some code in a script for an excel file…
You realize thats how it works with code too, even if its not as formalized of a contest (or sometimes, it is)… for example, gnome had its gnome bounties projects where they had things they wanted done for certain applications, and the person to implement it the best got the money and the code went into that application. The rest of the code was thrown out. Also, for little (bragging rights, ability to put it on a resume?) to no reward, the recent scheduler issue in the linux kernel had competition between a few people creating different schedulers. The code that was not chosen for inclusion in the kernel was thrown out. Relax, its not just graphic designers. I did an unpaid internship a few summers ago, creating a 3D models of quite a few different things for a simulation program, and after I completed the internship, a large amount of what I did was thrown out and contracted out to be completed to be done overseas.
This happens everywhere. It should be an expected part of life in a world run without a dictatorship.
They’re not treating graphic designres like crap, they’re treating enthusiastic amateurs like (badly paid) graphic designers. You get what you pay for.
Still, it’s only a handful of icons. Could look good on some student’s CV. Was never gonna make anyone rich.
That sounds like a pretty good point to me.
Sure, why not?
A while ago the Banshee project had a contest to write a plug-in to implement the “mini mode” sported by most other media players. The “prize” was something like a mention on the project leader’s blog, and a beer if they ever happened to be in the same place.
Were they taking programmers for granted? Were they insulting programmers by offering such a small reward? Should they have contracted a professional programmer, rather than relying on “poor/stupid freelancers”? What about the people who lost? Screw them?
In my experience, people contributing icons and other graphics are respected (and thanked) just as much as other volunteers who give up their free time to programme, create packages, write documentation, administer websites, triage bugs, and so on.
Because treatment -as- crap, where license is taken and resold to appear in a hideously composed ad later, and the attribution for the hideous part falsely given to the icon author, does not work on her Smartphone?
She waived the entry fee! What do you want? Jet service to the Venice Biennialle 32×32 (and under)? Should we donate 7000 lira to the cause of good vegetarian ricotta? The cover of Oprah Magazine for 3 months?
Ah…no wait, I get it; she is trying to only occupy the time of -bad- designers, otherwise out there making boxy solar designs that look like a 2004 Cadillac is parked in the attic, hiding from Deceptacons.
I agree with you 100%.
It infuriated me with my current employer when I started. I had to redesign a web app that we sold to make it nicer and more functional. All well and good but I’m no graphic designer and when I asked for some money to buy decent icons or to get one of our associated graphic designers to do some I was told to go find some freebies online.
Why oh why is graphic design relegated so often to this dirty tail ender option…?
“contract a professional designer, don’t rely of poor/stupid freelancers.”
Nice job tarnishing the freelancers. Btw, what in the hell has this got to do with OSS?
“What about the others who “lost”? Screw them?”
They still own their work so they can do whatever they want with it. If you cant handle losing, dont join a competition.
Hopefully your attitude isn’t typical for a graphic designer otherwise, well, maybe the problem isn’t on the OSS side.
I disagree. Especially for starting graphics designers this contest could be an add or a start for a portfolio.
Just as it is hard for beginning game developers to get a job at the game developer companies without experience.
OpenSource can be a great step stone. In addition i imagine a slashdot icon like icon of B.Gates with borg spectacles for anything MS related
Edited 2007-09-17 05:56
oxygen icons are dual licensed as lgpl and creative commons share-alike http://www.oxygen-icons.org/?page_id=4 so you could use them too
Mmm, they are very unclear about it. The previews are licensed under the noderiv-nc license until KDE4.0 comes out… But the icons themselves are ccsa? It’s getting confusing.
Well, it’s Tango anyway. They fit better with OSAlert too.
> they are very unclear about it.
from the webpage:
“Oxygen icon theme is dual licensed. You may copy it under the Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License or the GNU Library General Public License.”
not sure what’s unclear about that.
The unclarity stems from this:
Seeing KDE4 isn’t out yet, I figured the icons were not to be used yet. On top of that, we cannot really afford to be uncertain about these matters. The Tango guys have their set out, with one, clear, license, and that made the difference on the license part of the story.
In addition comes the aesthetics side of it; even though I personally really love the Oxygen set, it just doesn’t fit OSAlert as well as the Tango icons do.
Edited 2007-09-17 10:59 UTC
OK, long gone are the times where we only had 256 colour palettes. I can’t even remember the time when my display could only handle a maximum of 256 colours, so why stick around with an old, heavily deprecated (in my opinion) format? For those kinds of icons I would heavily prefer SVG, or at the very least PNG.
Edited 2007-09-16 23:54
Well, the PNG icons could be photos of real objects, such as a present box, a database (a filing cabinet?), a squished bug, a tree dimensional object (with proper angle at taking the photo), a judge, a guy with headphones, two guys discussing, a stop watch and and a cell phone… oh, and why have static icons? Let’s embed video clips instead of icons! “Flash” videos! Stupid idea, I know and I’ll stop kidding for now.
About the format: Yes, PNG would surely be a better choice than GIF.
OSAlert asks for GIFs because I can easily optimize them for smaller filesizes than PNGs, because that’s important for our cellphone support. The artists are free to export in SVG/PNG for other uses.
I’d say that’s not entirely true; have a look at the link below. It helps clarify why PNGs tend to be larger:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#File_size_an…
For the older, coarser, more jagged icons that may have been the case, but not anymore. Filesize of .pngs in comparison to .gifs of icons downloaded from the front page and converted in gimp:
09 – 75.8%
19 – 84.6%
28 – 63.9%
31 – 77.6%
32 – 103.3%
37 – 101.0%
45 – 66.0%
47 – 75.5%
71 – 110.5%*
78 – 90.6%
*significantly coarse, unlike most of the new icons (edit: it’s the bsd icon)
Edited 2007-09-17 02:26
I’m much more concerned that OSAlert won’t let me use the full site with a Nokia 770 even though I have two Mozilla-based browsers available, and both of them perfeclly capable of rendering and using the site properly.
By making that choice for me, and by providing me no way to override that choice (outside of using a hex editor to change mt browserID) even though I as an expert user know far more about my chosen platform and browser than you do, you place yourself in the same position as Microsoft, presuming to know more than your users and shoehorning them into functional boxes based on YOUR limited understaanding of their chosen alternative.
This is a formal request fir OSAlert to please provide a link on the limited mobile verson so expert usrs cn use the more advanced site at their own risk. The version of the site I use should be MY choice, not yours.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv5tejl; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061130 Minimo/0.016
Ditto for the Wii. It’s got a full Opera browser, even flash – it can handle the real site. The mobile version is just useless; the Opera Wii isn’t a ‘mobile’ browser.
I agree whole-heartedly.
But you say Mozilla based? Try about:config and search for general.useragent You should be able to override your useragent, yeah, it sucks to have to resort to that.
I think what we’ll do is make an alternate URL that will disregard the user agent and override our mobile design for those who want the full version regardless of their device. Thanks for the idea.
Heck, even the Maemo version of Opera mostly works.
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; ; Linux armv5tejl; U) Opera 8.02 [en_US] Maemo browser 0.4.34 N770/SU-18
…to be actually TYPING a message via the stylus keypad. The browsers are quite capable – but the ‘browsee’ requires some retraining.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv5tejl; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20070810 Firefox/3.0a1 Maemo browser 0.4.34 N770/SU-18
I can’t see then in ths browser (console on a 770! w00t!), but even my older DOS graphics programs like Neopaint can handle GIF images fairly well. They typically don’t do PNG.
Browser: Links (1.00pre17; Linux 2.6.16.27-omap1 armv5tejl; 64×13)
It’s your site. Be responsible for it’s UI. I’m sure you guys can come up with something compelling.
The new icons are looking great, but I beg of you to consider using your old trustworthy logo instead of the one being used now on the OSAlert 4 page.
I think, that the old logo would somehow tie up the page better. The new logo seems somehow to.. it’s just too flat for the flat enough page without clear visual separators between the articles.
Also fonts – posts/entries seem a bit crammed on the new page.
But besides that – everything is looking good. Specially content-wise.
This is just asking others to follow the same guidelines, and come up with near the same thing. You could even end up picking and choosing the best of each icon between the submissions, because the colours are all going to match.
Rather uninspiring to say the least. You should also allow submissions of a full icon set done how the artist sees fit.
I chose to have all the icons from the same icon set to create a more consistent feel across OSAlert. We were using all sorts of different icons, a mish-mash of styles, and I hated it. We needed icons with a consistent feel – consistent colours, lighting, and overall style.
So, logically, the icons we want must follow the same Tango guidelines as closely as possible.
I meant a /full/ icon set. i.e. let the artist, if they choose, implement every topic icon so that they don’t have to follow Tango guidelines, but still maintain a consistent style across all icons according to their chosen design.
Erm, most of our icons, as explained, cannot be redesigned. They are logos from companies and projects, and they will not change (unless the company itself changes logos).
The Tango set fit in perfectly, so why duplicate efforts? As a graphics artist, you’ll need to learn to work according to guidelines anyway.
As a paid graphics artist, I work within guidelines; as an unpaid graphics artist, I show what I’m capable of
I already had an idea for dealing with the company logos anyway.
“…win a subscription to our ad-free version!”
I must be missing something here. I am not a paid subscriber, yet I don’t see any ads when I view OSAlert. If I had not read the above, I wouldn’t have known there was an ad-free version of OSAlert available.
I did view the sample ad-free page, and it didn’t look substantially different from what I already see on the non-ad-free pages.
I realize this comment doesn’t address other benefits of being a paid subscriber; it only concerns advertising or the lack thereof on OSAlert.
Edit: spelling
Edited 2007-09-17 13:32
Aren’t you using AdBlock+, pal?
You don’t see ads? Take a peek:
http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/8478/osnsf7.png
OSAlert puts ads everywhere “to pay hosting fees”. With all this money David could at least pay his staff. This is unfair.
Do you ever stop whining? It’s unattractive.
It would be nice to use some more modern format, say svg. svg takes less space and resizes very well – it doesn’t get “pixelised”
We don’t resize our icons, so that benefit is useless. On top of that, svg support is not universal, while gif support is.
People always forgot we need to render everywhere.
Edited 2007-09-17 14:02 UTC
You don’t resize icons, but users do – they enlarge page to read text. At least I do
. Which browsers do not support svg? I’m not talking about IE, but web browsers.
Internet Explorer definitely is a major concern. Out in the real world, IE is still the number one browser, and we need to support it fully.
But what about Net+? Voyager? PocketIE? Opera Mini? Netfront? OpenWave? And on top of that, even Firefox’s, Safari’s, Konqueror’s, and so on, SVG support is NOT complete, while they DO support GIF *all the way*.
The choice for GIF is one that is absolutely non-negotiable. We’re not a small weblog that needs to render in just Gecko, WebCore and IE – we render on everything, with everything, everywhere. PNG is even 100% out of the question, let alone SVG.
Which browsers do not support svg? I’m not talking about IE, but web browsers.
Are you stupid? IE is the most widely used web browser. If you don’t render properly in IE, go get another job.
Are you stupid? IE is the most widely used web browser. If you don’t render properly in IE, go get another job.
The fact that it is the most used web browser doesn’t imply that it is the most capable one. SVG might be a relatively new standard, but IE completely fails to render properly nearly 10 years old such as CSS2. It is sad that webdesigners* have to work their way around this stupid thing in order to make decent looking websites…
* When I say webdesigners, I mean the good ones and not the guys that use FrontPage to make their stuff, by the way.
I’ve decided to have a bit of a go, but being a bit simple today (I think staring at Transport Tycoon’s pixels for so long on Sunday has done something to the brain) – aren’t entirely sure if I’ve followed Tango’s guidelines strictly enough. So if anyone fancies telling me so, here’s a quickie of the bug icon that I’ve knocked up:- http://alistair_b.eml.cc/random/testbug.png
Edited 2007-09-17 15:13
That’s actually not bad
. The yellow glare is a bit pointless though, and you might want to make its body a bit less ‘puffy’.
Still, not bad.
Nice.
If there existing a ReactOS logo as Tango-theme, then it could also be integrated in ReactOS, because ReactOS used Tango, too.
Same with Syllable.
But please ask for the SVG-format. Tango itself used SVG. And Tango is converted to different pixel-graphics formats.
Convertig scalable graphics to pixel graphics is easy. But the other way around not.
Everybody can make the icons in whatever file format they want – as long as the icon they send to us is a 32×32 GIF image.
why didn’t you guys decide to replace the sci-fi icon too?
Icon’s – gotta say I couldn’t care less.
After learning to read, I pretty much just “READ THE HEADLINE” to determine if I want to go any further, and really couldn’t care less what little graphic doodad is in front of it.
When I was a beta tester for NewDeal Office 98 (a PC/Geos suite), there was an internal icon design contest and my icon for Preferences made it. Looks like a chance for me to go at it again!