Re: GNOMEPrint, Icons, and shades of InSight..

[Gleef <gleef capital net>]

On Sun, 9 Aug 1998, Bowie Poag wrote:
> > Well, you should at least finish your thought.  (c:  Was there a _problem_ you
> > ran into at Insight?  Was it too much work?  Or did the scaled icons just look
> > bad?  With Gleef's scheme, each size would have its own separately-drawn icon,
> > so scaling isn't a problem.  And it'll only be done once, for the single foot
> > icon (or if it becomes themable, then the themed replacements, too), and then
> > we'll never have to worry about it again.
> > 
> > What made multiple icon sizes unworkable at Insight?  At least tell us that
> > much.
> 
[ snip ]
> 
> So, now, we had only a handful of icon sizes to be concerned with, which
> by and large eliminated the storage space worries we had for the archive,
> and in doing so, assured the user of having good looking icons. A very
> elegant comprimise.
> 
> This is why its a bad idea for the (foot) icon to be on the menu bar with
> text. Text is something you WANT to have exacting control over the size
> of. 7 point, 8 point, 9 point, 10 point, whatever. You cant really do the
> same thing to icons without incurring the wrath of Ugly Icon Syndrome. The
> best scaling engines in the room will produce a crappy looking icon if the
> icon isnt A) Bilaterally symmetric, and B) Scaled to a resolution which is
> a factor of, or a MEDIAN between two factors of the original dimensions of
> the source image.

This definately sounds like a job for those of you doing mockups.  Let's
actually see how the GNOMEprint looks next to various sizes of larger
text, and take a 1.5x or a 2x GNOMEprint, and see how it looks next to
similar text.  We need to see how much the text size can deviate from the
GNOMEprint size before it looks ugly.  We also need to see if there is
a point where no reasonable GNOMEprint will make the menubar look decent.

-Gleef