The two forum icon designs are both really nice, I’d be happy either one
as the official forum icon. I think either way, it should always show
up in the favicon too.
@contributors what do you think about those custom icons for the forum?
1 Like
@webDev , I do not criticize your contribution(s), but the inability of oled screen to handle long static blue (& thus white) lightning for 2 scientific reasons : oled blue pixel inner materials have shorten life than other colors & oled blue pixel need more intensity.
Burn-in oled blue pixels don’t happen on dynamic renderings. As far as I remember, blue (& white) was best friend of lcd screens. QD-Oled may also change this : Samsung to Invest $11 Billion in QD-OLED Panel Production (comments)
As a deductive conclusion with pre-hypothesis of eco-green respect/concept , fdroid should move away from blue (& white). Especially considering the flat/square static design of F-Droid global (not speaking of the negative controversial? of blue light technology: Biological effects of high-energy visible light - Wikipedia )
Further more, with upcoming 10/years anniversary, a shift to darkOrange? or other, prior to your contribution(s), could have some significance ?
This said, F-Droid may be Born to Be Blue ?
Blueprint favicon 16px in context:
Thanks @oF2pks for the links! I had an old phone that did have this problem. It took 3-4 years to notice it. If newer phones (s4 and above) are better, as the link suggests, then I’m not going to worry but I’ll push the svg to f-droid’s “artwork” repository (if it is chosen by the other contributers). I’ll point you to it. Then you can contact a launcher-app designer like Amexia to create a blue-less palette?
Keep in mind two things:
a) icons were not what causing the problem on my old phone, the notification bar did, and
b) I only noticed it when viewing images in full screen when the notification bar went away, which was not very often.
c) A broken CRT TV I once had couldn’t activate the blue pixels sometimes, it was not nice to watch tv with at all with just red and green.
BTW the wikipedia article on blue (and white) that you posted seems to debunk the blue-light-keeps-you-awake idea.
EDIT: Thanks for the playlist suggestion. 
@webDev notification icons are “special” , you have to check the Google doc.
I think they have to be only in black and white.
I like the first one and the last one just not the one in the middle (the one with the “big bubble” looks too much like WA 
).
Thanks Izzy, haha. Yeah, I personally prefer the blueprint version also. Twas a good suggestion by @hans to keep F-Droid in the picture/icon.
To a Marcus: (I received a message from a Marcus over Gitlab. Is it one of you guys @marcus77, @Marcus or @Bubu? You wanted to see the progress but gitlab wouldn’t show you svgs.)
So here’s what I’m ready to push, if there are no major objections.
EDIT: Tues 10 Dec (boosted contrast (blue body lighter so copyleft is more visible)
Icon for website (hero):
.
App icon with layer choice of white, grey or yellow background:
. . . . . . . 
.
In-app art asset for when app icon is not yet loaded:
.
Default notification:
.
Updates notification:
.
Favicon:
Favicon in context:
.
Available on F-Droid
.
Get It On F-Droid:
.
Privileged Extension
.
Forums app icon (ONLY FOR FORUM APP AND FORUM WEBSITE):
.
Forum website icon in context (mobile):
.
Forum website icon in context (desktop):
.
Favicon for forums:
Any improvements @contributors? If so, I’ll edit this post, if not I’ll push.
3 Likes
Yes, those were the ones I meant to like 
And yes, the Marcus was most likely Bubu. But to be sure, let’s wait who claims it 
I just went on the Gitlab website. Yes it was Bubu.
BTW I’ve pushed the icon update to gitlab and the Merge Request (I think).
If any problems, do tell.
I wasn’t expecting to have this done so close to 2020 but better to be early for the 10 Year Anniversary rather than late.
@oF2pks and possibly others over the year talked about celebrating the 10 Years and I thought it might be nice to celebrate with an award ribbon on our F-Droid. Thoughts?
The ribbon is a layer in the SVGs that can be switched off.
App icons: (my preferred background layer is yellow because it has an exciting feel, otherwise the light-grey might work well.)
.
Get It On badges:
.
Website (?):
.
Favicon:
.
Favicon in context:
The badge should be removed from anything during any post-Jan-2021 update
EDIT: This has now been pushed to gitlab, @hans, so it’s ready for you to merge. I can export any PNGs for the app, just ask. Otherwise I’ll be moving onto the website next.
4 Likes
they all look great in terms of form and color. I’m not a big fan of
the shiny look, but I’m OK with it if people want it.
2 Likes
I wonder if @Pander is on the forum, they do work on the artwork
section, so it would be good to have their opinion.
Thanks Hans. I took leaves out of Font Awesome icon design principles for form. For colour I realised I could introduce small quantities of yellow and red to enliven the design for the year ahead.
Yes, the shiny look is designed to evoke cleanliness and newness to the new users that I feel F-Droid should start to appeal to. I think they will respond positively to the shiny look. Its not supposed to dominate any renderings of the icon. I’ll re-render the icons later today large and then shrink them in a raster image editor to emulate proper sub-sampling. Inkscape renderings can be temperamental, notice how the “GET IT ON” badges don’t show the shine at all! If the shine is still too white at 128px I’ll reduce it’s opacity.
Shininess has long been used in marketing to entice people to buy things that are bad for them (and their privacy), I feel like fighting the fire with fire, frankly.
2 Likes
Hi @Hans, good call. I had two shines overlapping each other in the fdroid_logo.svg file, when I removed one it looked better.
I’ve edited the above ‘Medal ribbon’ post (only) to show this change. Note that the GET IT ON badge now has a visible shine after using the technique described in the preceding post. The rendering problem is among problems that I should report to the Inkscape dev team because it disrupts workflow significantly. Again tell me if you need me to generate the image files for the app.
No changes were made to the favicon despite the History dialog suggesting it.
Windows XP uses a popular colour combo, blue and green, but F-Droid logo is already blue and green. XP never entered my mind at any stage.
Btw, @Pander (or yourself) may want to validate how I edited the F-Droid screenshot very slightly months ago. I separated the icons in the bottom bar from their text by a couple pixels and reduced the icon size by couple pixels. I did this because margins are a quick (often subconscious) quality cue for many people. Margins that are off-kilter can illicit a messy or confused feeling.
(Also made those icons duotone and the grey background of the content pane a couple shades darker for more pronounced separation. If you like what I did with the icons I can edit them myself if you’re busy).
It also might be worthwhile to put a darker shade of blue behind the menu item that the person has selected rather than change the position and scale of the icon and it’s text. BTW I just noticed that the menu text doesn’t return to it’s original size after a person selects a different menu item (a very minor omission but alas one that might now be addressed with a slight improvement in the UI).
The bottom nav could use some polish, the tricky thing is considering all the variables. For example, the tab title word lengths vary widely between languages. Chinese is usually 2 characters, while many other languages have all long words. That’s why the margins are tight and the zooming animation was deliberately removed.
In terms of margins my suggestion involves mostly changing the icon, and not the text (ie. making the icons a bit smaller etc).
These days tend to see icons the current size in the ‘line’-icon style rather than the solid-icon-style.
In the case of Chinese it seems the minimum number of pixels that will be needed are 12x12 (simplified characters - Lowest pixel resolution needed to support Chinese? - Chinese Language Stack Exchange), however depending on the characters they say you may be able to get away with 8x8. Are all phone screens that F-Droid support, higher resolution (aka retina-like), if so you may be able to get away with 8x8. At 8x8 hopefully other languages will not expand too far horizontally into each other?
You may want to double-check that, the text grows in size when a user taps the item, but it doesn’t reduce in size after the user taps a different menu item.
EDIT: I agree that the text should not grow and shrink. What I would say is double-check that, stop the icon from moving vertically when selected, make the icon 2-3px smaller, separate the icon from the text a tiny bit more to match this image, consider a darker background for the selected menu item (added below).
The following may not be needed (I didn’t do it in the below image but you may need to if Chinese text needs to be bigger): Consider increasing the height of the entire blue menu by 2px or so.
Result would approximate this (the only difference is I added the dark region):
Like this, @hotlittlewhitedog ?
If I made this, I’d call it the F-Droid Copyleft Crusader, but I don’t know where we would use this icon, it’s a bit too militant for everyday F-Droid usage.
(Had this piece of scrap paper floating around my abode for a while so thought I better post it up so I can clean house, lol)
1 Like
Haha, Yes something like that.
Rem: it’s a droid coming for peace, not to kill
F-Droid Copyleft Messenger of Peace
Our ambassador of open source on Android