Ive been working on some unified icons for the instance so the icons feel like they belong together
Let me know if you like them or if there’s some adjustments I should make
Some examples from ones I’ve done
The majority of them are generated from https://game-icons.net/ with the settings of foreground being shrunk twice and position being x:2 y:2. Foreground color is diagonal from 2EE5D2 to A01FC5. And has a shadow with color 423025 and blur set to 15. The background color is just black
I really like the aesthetic of the local communities for general topic categories; great iconography!
For the lang communities, or communities for projects with widely recognizable or official logos, I’m not so sure about unifying those as well, as it could hamper the visual brand recognition and association of the community with its target focus. For example, with so many communities, it’s kind of convenient to be able to quickly glance the list and pick out recognizable interests without even reading the multiple pages of search results or labeled lists.
That said, perhaps there is merit in going fully unified, as then remote subscribers could easily identify communities hosted from the programing.dev instance, a pattern that other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.world have already set a UX precedent for.
However, beehaw does benefit from having a recognizable shape (a hexagon), along with a high contrast color pallet (black on yellow), making it easier to recognise silhouetted logos, given the high contrast, even at smaller resolutions no bigger than the subtitle font size in Lemmy’s post feed. Admittedly, some of the black on purple gradients here look a little dark to read at font height scale.
I think we could also help some mods to find project artwork or logos that are textless, increasing their relative size for easier visual recognition. E.g.
Textless:
Of course some icons are unavoidably text, like php, R, C/C++, etc.
But their also common enough to ID on sight given additional color cues.
Java coffee? No way, we should use Duke!
I’m actually fine either way, I just have a soft spot for weird mascots, like the 1996 Olympics mascot Izzy.
I guess it was officially “open sourced” under a BSD license, but I still mentally associate that mascot with 💰 Oracle:
Do these icons seem better to read? (the ones other than godot have the new style). Gave them a rotated hexagon background + made the colors lighter
I think circles are better. While circles don’t pop out as much as cropped polygons, I think they still fit better with the general web ecosystem of avatars and profile icons. Not to mention they allow for a slightly larger canvas size for artwork already circle cropped by Lemmy-UI’s CSS .
It would be cool if Communities could be rounded squares, and reserve circles for users, just like github orgs vs github users. That could help with readability between the two when skimming icons in lemmy’s page feeds. But perhaps that should be a user customization. As long as most artworks abide by best practices for maskable icons, then different lemmy clients, web UIs, mobile app launchers, etc, could crop however they like:
The new brighter colors do help. BTW, I do love rainbows. One thing you might want to try is once you’ve settled on a good saturation and value for readability, you could diversify the hue across different icons (with perhaps the hues for the gradients derived from the original/official logos/icon’s color palette, if not too difficult to maintain), allowing local communities to be more readily distinguishable from each other at a glance, while still unified stylistically for our instance, sort of like a colorful android launcher icon pack?
Perhaps we could code up scripts to do this theming, so we could automate this procedurally? Similar to this art pipeline: