ReactOS icon set

The place to bring up any design issues, or post your own creations

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mf
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Post by mf »

Right, I totally forgot about that. Actually, the fact that there's a my computer icon in explorer.exe's own resource tree kind of got me off on the wrong foot :).
altec
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Post by altec »

so when do you think the hole pack thing well be done and do you plan on making a set for linix and win?
mf
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Post by mf »

I guess the whole set (meaning icons for ALL dlls and integrated ros apps) would be finished when, *tata* ReactOS is finished! :roll:

I am not aiming for Windows or Linux as platforms for these icons, though it should be simple to port them to Windows/linux iconsets.
ma-games.de
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Post by ma-games.de »

When do you think ReactOS is finished? A poll here says, the most users think 2-3 years: http://www.reactos.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=116
welly
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Post by welly »

Nice job, MF.. really nice. Could I make a slight suggestion (which is a bit cheeky as this is only my second post!) - could you possibly make the recyle logo on the recycle bin a tiny bit smaller as it's right on the edge of the recycle bin and asthetically probably needs a slight border. Just a thought!

Cheers,

Welly
mf
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Post by mf »

Well, with all this talk about uniform perspective, I've been thinking. This has never been an issue with me before, as I've always made 8bit icons, in isometric perspective. Doing truecolor ones in 3D perspective is admittedly new to me. So I'm basically still thinking how the hell to get this done without looking like WinXP. Issue: the drive images MUST be frontal perspective. They simply look ugly at a 3/4 perspective. I might have to think of a combination between frontal and 3/4 depending on the type of icon. And isometric is just outdated nowadays, so I'm not gonna go for that whatever happens. Trimetric could be an option (the folder icons are currently semi-trimetric), but I'll be making life pretty hard on myself fitting all those stock photos into trimetric.
mf
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Post by mf »

First completed icon! This one is 100% final, and I'm not changing a single thing about it :). It's the ReactOS logo, and Start button icon.

[ external image ]
(link)

Please think along with my previous post, btw, since nobody has replied since then :?.
Delfi
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Post by Delfi »

i'd suggest you grab shell32.dll for a list of what icons you need :)

the my computer icon is realy cool too, add some application windows on it maybe..
counting_pine
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Post by counting_pine »

Please, could you make that 99.9% final? I think it's a great icon, but I have a couple of technical suggestions:
(1) You can shave off about a kilobyte by taking unused colours out of the 256 colour palettes.
(2) The 32x32 256-colour image has a non-black transparent background, which could make it look a bit funny on some systems.

If you don't know how to do change it, I can e-mail you the modified icon, or find somewhere to upload it.
mf
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Post by mf »

counting_pine wrote:Please, could you make that 99.9% final? I think it's a great icon, but I have a couple of technical suggestions:
(1) You can shave off about a kilobyte by taking unused colours out of the 256 colour palettes.
(2) The 32x32 256-colour image has a non-black transparent background, which could make it look a bit funny on some systems.

If you don't know how to do change it, I can e-mail you the modified icon, or find somewhere to upload it.
1) There is only 1 unused color, which is the transparency key I used in PSP, either vile pink or bright yellow. There are no other unused colors, it's a tailored palette. Because it's an 8-bit palette, everything that is below the 256-color count gets set to black. I don't know of any way to make palettes with custom bit values, and I figure it's incompatible as hell as I've never seen any icons do it.
2) Transparency is a "special" color index in icons, afaik. It doesn't have any colors. Feel free to prove me wrong though, because I've never really studied the binary contents of .ico files, just edited them with various icon editors. And "some systems" should NOT be ReactOS. If it's a valid icon, it should eat it, and display it properly.

That said, it's an icon for gods sake, we live in a world of gigahertzes and terabytes, and you're telling me 1024 bytes is going to make a performance difference on ReactOS? I smell maintaining hell, you're not the one who's going to have to engineer at least 500 semi-unique icons for a project, since I see nobody else stand up and make proper icons without stealing them from other open source projects.
uniQ
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Post by uniQ »

Calmly, calmly.

Anyway good to see this thread aback.

-uniQ
Coming on, coming up, let me help ROS and I'll be able to look @ a life well used.
counting_pine
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Post by counting_pine »

(1) Each 8-bit image has a 256-colour palette:
The 16x16 one uses 91 colours
The 32x32 one uses 182 colours
The 48x48 one uses 209 colours
The 64x64 one uses 241 colours
I'm pretty sure about this. If I'm wrong, I have a program that needs debugging:)

(2) Icon transparency works like this (apart from 32-bit icons):
There is one bitmap (1-bit / 4-bit / 8-bit / 24-bit etc) that contains the icon image. It's generally known as the XOR image.
There is another (1-bit) image that does the transparency. It's generally known as the AND image.
Sometimes, Windows just checks the 'AND' pixel to decide whether or not to draw the 'XOR' pixel, but sometimes it does something more complicated.

This page can probably explain better than I can how these images are combined together. But essentially, the colour of transparent pixels can change the background. You don't often see this, because black is normally used, and that's the neutral colour. White, on the other hand, inverts the colour underneath, an effect that's sometimes used in cursors.

[ external image ]
Here's what the icons look like in Explorer (Windows XP). The icon I'm talking about is number 5.


OK, sorry I'm being so fussy. I hadn't appreciated how many icons you were doing, so just ignore what I said about the colour palettes.
I do think the transparency issue is semi-important though. If you want me to make sure the transparency's ok in any of your icons (although it sounds like you don't:), then I'm happy to do that.
mf
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Post by mf »

You are 100% positive that your extracted icons are 100% identical to the ones packed into my single .ico ? I have checked the icon in various WinXP display modes, and they all checked out fine. Also, the strange soft pink color on that background is not in the 256-color palette (it can't, since the palette was generated outside the icon editor) nor have I used it anywhere else. I'll check it all a second time tomorrow. Also, you're right about the color counts, but like I said, any colors below the 256-color count get set to black, which is as good as you can do for "discarding" non-used entries, since you can't use custom bpp values like 6 or 7. Also, I didn't mean to come over as angry or anything like that, I just have a built-in defense for any of my creations :). That, and, I don't really like the prospect of doing an entire iconset, even though I want to do it. Actually, making 8-bit and 4-bit variants was easier than I suspected, and I was done within the hour. Still, many hours ahead. Anyone any ideas on the perspective issue?
mf
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Post by mf »

Okay, I checked in my icon editor, and one of the custom color palettes was causing transparency anomalies. The icon has been fixed, re-download it from the same location. Sorry about my scepticism!
counting_pine
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Post by counting_pine »

OK, thanks. Just to confirm, the pink border is gone:)

I don't know if this link is of any use to you, it basically explains the convention that Microsoft has adopted with Windows XP icons. I know their icons have a different style, but the article gives some advice, e.g. to use one perspective grid for all icons, but it gives suggestions of where a straight-on look might be better.
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