go-home echo icon concept

[Diana Fong]

Martin Sourada wrote:
> I folowed the guidlines and there is said: "The shadow is formed by 
> lines from the isometric grid. It is appears primarily behind the 
> object; as well as a bit in front of and under the object. Do not to 
> use black, as it is too harsh and does not scale well...dark gray is 
> acceptable."
>
> Do you think, that using black with transparency would be better than 
> using dark-grey without transparency (save for the blur effect which 
> adds transparency, of course)?
>
> And yes, it would be good to document the certain values on wiki. But 
> we must first decide which ones are the best...

The shadow, quickly examined, is a sort of gradient with the darkest 
(sometimes solid) color at one end (often closest/touching the object) 
and a transition to transparent pixels at the other thus allowing the 
sense of integration with the panel, background, and such.  The general 
guideline provided was to describe my approach of using a dark gray as 
the starting point for the shadow's gradient.  When creating the initial 
icons I often found myself creating far too dark shadows if I started 
with black.  When creating several of these icons a day, I easily found 
my shadows getting darker and darker.  Thus starting with a dark gray, 
instead of black, helped me take care of this problem and thus my posted 
suggestion to other contributors. 

What should the values be?

Colors and shapes are relative.  Artists should be encouraged to use 
their artistic sense in determining relative colors, with the posted 
palette as a base guideline.  A color determined for one icon might not 
work as well for another, thus the value added by artists who can 
visually compensate and flexibly combine colors and shapes to create 
pieces that work both as an individual icon and as part of the whole 
set.  An example of this is...system-search...the tilt of the object 
requires darker shadows near the handle and a lighter shadow cast by the 
glass itself.  Compare this icon to any of the others that sit directly 
on surface, such as applications-internet, the shadows for those are 
slightly darker.

With that said, I am not opposed to further clarifying, correcting, or 
expanding the initial guidelines.  With specific questions such as the 
ones raised about Stars and Pluses, the guidelines can be made to be 
more detailed and informative.  This is an ongoing project.  Presenting 
works in progress, runs the risk of missing and inadequate information. 
However, these can be constructively discussed, proposed, and remedied.

To address this specific issue, I still stand with my recommendation of 
starting with a dark gray instead of black.  Due to the blur aspect of 
the shadow, it seemed somewhat obvious that the shadow would be 
semitransparent...but this can be specifically added in the guidelines 
for additional clarity.  As for the exact value of dark gray...perhaps 
Luya can propose (and Martin or others can confirm) a few Hex Values, 
since the shadows on the emotion icons seem to be good starting points.  
However, I would like to stress again, that these numbers should really 
be used as references, allowing artists the flexibility to tweak as 
appropriate from icon to icon.


Diana Fong
---
Red Hat
Visual Designer | Desktop Group