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Ive been working on some unified icons for the instance so the icons feel like they belong together
Let me know if you like them or if there's some adjustments I should make
Some examples from ones I've done
The majority of them are generated from https://game-icons.net/ with the settings of foreground being shrunk twice and position being x:2 y:2. Foreground color is diagonal from 2EE5D2 to A01FC5. And has a shadow with color 423025 and blur set to 15. The background color is just black
These are awesome! One thing I like about beehaw is their visually consistent icons. It’s great we’re planning to have them as well.
I’m terrible at graphics so I used Midjourney to create the icon and background for [email protected] but I must admit they turned out pretty bad.
If it’s not too much trouble, would you consider making an icon for us too?
Sure I made one for your community and added it
Thank you, it's really cool, I like it!
These are great! It's cool to get a feel for which instance the community is from at a glance
Yeah, Beehaw is really on-point with the branding. Little honey hexes? No way we can beat that! But yeah, I really like the colorscheme. It matches the colorscheme a lot of programming tools use today (or at least a lot I use).
Did some more tweaking to the colors to make them work a bit better on light theme and ive got the foreground colors now set to 2FFDFD and F144D5
Wow! Looks great and super easy to do. Just made one for [email protected]
I also like the cohesion between the communities on an instance.
I really like the aesthetic of the local communities for general topic categories; great iconography!
For the lang communities, or communities for projects with widely recognizable or official logos, I'm not so sure about unifying those as well, as it could hamper the visual brand recognition and association of the community with its target focus. For example, with so many communities, it's kind of convenient to be able to quickly glance the list and pick out recognizable interests without even reading the multiple pages of search results or labeled lists.
That said, perhaps there is merit in going fully unified, as then remote subscribers could easily identify communities hosted from the programing.dev instance, a pattern that other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.world have already set a UX precedent for.
However, beehaw does benefit from having a recognizable shape (a hexagon), along with a high contrast color pallet (black on yellow), making it easier to recognise silhouetted logos, given the high contrast, even at smaller resolutions no bigger than the subtitle font size in Lemmy's post feed. Admittedly, some of the black on purple gradients here look a little dark to read at font height scale.
Do these icons seem better to read? (the ones other than godot have the new style). Gave them a rotated hexagon background + made the colors lighter
I think circles are better. While circles don't pop out as much as cropped polygons, I think they still fit better with the general web ecosystem of avatars and profile icons. Not to mention they allow for a slightly larger canvas size for artwork already circle cropped by Lemmy-UI's CSS .
It would be cool if Communities could be rounded squares, and reserve circles for users, just like github orgs vs github users. That could help with readability between the two when skimming icons in lemmy's page feeds. But perhaps that should be a user customization. As long as most artworks abide by best practices for maskable icons, then different lemmy clients, web UIs, mobile app launchers, etc, could crop however they like:
The new brighter colors do help. BTW, I do love rainbows. One thing you might want to try is once you've settled on a good saturation and value for readability, you could diversify the hue across different icons (with perhaps the hues for the gradients derived from the original/official logos/icon's color palette, if not too difficult to maintain), allowing local communities to be more readily distinguishable from each other at a glance, while still unified stylistically for our instance, sort of like a colorful android launcher icon pack?
Perhaps we could code up scripts to do this theming, so we could automate this procedurally? Similar to this art pipeline:
I think we could also help some mods to find project artwork or logos that are textless, increasing their relative size for easier visual recognition. E.g.
Textless:
Of course some icons are unavoidably text, like php, R, C/C++, etc.
But their also common enough to ID on sight given additional color cues.
I hope you don't mind, I made one for the XR Dev community (made a banner as well). At first it had a different colorscheme as I didn't know about icon guidelines but now have updated it accordingly: https://programming.dev/c/xrdev
Alright yeah that one looks great
There isnt technically icon guidelines yet until the icon poll in this post finishes https://programming.dev/post/190520
Once thats done ill be switching the communities like meta, programming, and the new ones over to whatever style wins