To take my mind of programming for a bit, I thought I’d take a shot at designing an icon for the game. Below are three I’ve come up with. I would love some feedback. I like the first one the most. I used Apples Image playground tool to be completely transparent, we’ll create our own of the winning version later.
I like them, espec. the one with the trees. A little bit distracted by the different sizes of the fields, in a puzzle of this type all tiles would be equal.
IMHO they are all too detailed for an icon. Most icons are displayed at 48x48px or 64x64px, max 96x96px. Try them at these sizes.
EDIT: For an icon I would base it on vector graphics, to be easy scalable.
True about the grid sizes, hard to get Image playground to keep them all the same, but just using it to get an idea. I agree the picture would be better and I’d also like it to be jumbled, which is why, we’ll create our own in InkScape later, so it will be vector based..
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Okay think I got the squares almost correct.. lol. I prefer the illustration look as well, over the more animation style look of the original. I don’t think when used as an Icon, we’ll create our own anyway, that the slight different sized cells in the second to bottom row would be noticeable.
How do you create the images? Are they generated?
As I mention in the first post, for transparency, I’m just playing with Apple’s Image playground to create an image based on a description. We’ll create our own in InkScape for the final version.
Ok, I wasn’t aware that apple playground is a genAI.
It’s pretty cool, and uses the intelligence cores on your local machine, if you have an Apple Silicon Mac. Nothing gets sent to Apple or anyone. Basically, I have my own LLM that been/being trained from my own documents and coding. In Apple intelligence there is the option to use Chat GPT if it can’t work out the problem but I have that turned off. The only thing I send to Apple is dereferenced voice files when talking to SIRI to help improve speech recognition. Other than that I have all other send options turned off.
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I like the first one, but All of them are WAY too detailed for icons. Macs allow for larger icons, but I recommend seeing how it looks at 64x64.
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I agree a bit too detailed. Apple default size for icons is 1024x1024, but you can include different versions for different sizes.
Although, doesn’t look too bad at 64x64
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That looks better than I expected
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Yeah surprised me as well, I’ll do the first version as well so you can see..
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Crazy icon size.
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Here, the first one at 64 x64, not as great, you loose a lot of the detail.
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Not when you consider all Macs now, and those desktop Macs using Apple displays, are all High DPI so there is a lot more clarity, than on a non High DPI monitor.
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If you only plan for a Mac release, ok. I would design for all OS and maybe a highDPI version for the mac folks. And I always would start from a vector design for an icon.
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Always the plan, and good practise.
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Too much of everything, too much detail. The point of icons is to bring ideas across with clarity and visual economy. The main function of an icon is to be instantly readable and recognizable at any size.
Case in point: 3x3 would be enough to communicate the idea of a grid, and a couple (or even a single) tree silhouette may be enough to communicate the idea of a landscape.
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I agree, as I’ve stated I was just using playground to get some idea’s, none of these will ever be the final icon. We’ll use InkScape (A vector based drawing program) to create our own custom icons. All these are just for ideas sake.
I use SVGRepo for my plugin icons. I can edit colors, play with them, and don’t have to worry about them looking bad. Especially since I use them for Godot icons, I download a few options, load them into the editor and see how they look at 16x16, then go from there. They always expand fine.
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