Re: Fwd: [gnome-love] Participate to the GNOME Goals and feel the love!

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 18:24 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 02:13 +0200, Esben Stien wrote:
> > I don't agree;). If you make a simple big one and scale it down, it'll
> > still look good. You don't make an icon small; at least in my view and
> > I do a lot of 3d modeling. I never think about size when I model. It's
> > all relative. If I model a bus, then go up on a mountain and look down
> > on the bus, it's still the bus, just smaller.
> > 
> You are welcome to disagree all you want. You are still wrong. 3d is a
> very different beast from SVG. You can not create a single SVG that will
> render properly at different sizes. In 3D games, and the like, where
> even at a distance, the object still looks good, this is because of how
> the core functionality works. SVG was not designed well to be scalable
> beyond small thresholds. It does not add or remove particular details of
> an object when scaling up or down, as 3D applications do.

To be perfectly fair, there are provisions in SVG for
adjusting various details at different sizes.  But we
don't have good tools to take advantage of that, and
even if we did, it could very well be harder on our
overworked artists than just making raster images.

But it's absolutely true that we need adjustments to
the icons at different sizes.  We're not making scale
models of objects; we're making icons that should be
easy to recognize and identify.

Esban, you talk about modeling a bus.  Go out for a
drive and look for a street sign with a bus on it.
Is it a photo-realistic representation of a bus?  Of
course not.  It's probably a silhouette of what you
think a bus looks like, and it probably doesn't have
every last curve and dent that a real bus would have.

And if I were making that bus icon for a big street
sign, I'd probably include about six windows or so.
Not photo-realistic windows, just squares where it's
not black.  But if I were to make that same icon for
something small (say, an indicator light in your car
that tells you when a school bus is near), I'd leave
out some of those windows, maybe all of them.

It's not just that icons don't need to be perfect
replicas to do their job.  In fact, perfect replicas
will generally do an even worse job.

--
Shaun