OSNews

I'm surprised that there are no Tango icons for databases, multimedia or news.

>What about the others who "lost"? Screw them?

No, they simply lost. That's what a COMPETITION means.
However, it would be possible to use DIFFERENT icons from DIFFERENT artists, in which case, they should all get a subscription.

>contract a professional designer

OSNews is not News.com with millions in the bank.

No, they simply lost. That's what a COMPETITION means.

This is why it's just plain wrong to do it. This is like considering graphic design as just a poor job that is only worth...A contest. Like on an assembly line: Produce in mass and throw away all that doesn't meet the quality requirements. The difference is that graphic design is done by human beings, during their free time, and their time is as valuable as yours, so is their work.

Are you being intentionally dense?

Whats your point? OSS code is written by human beings in their free time. This contest is no different from other ones, including code contests. Some have expensive prices, some don't. That's why you can, you know, *choose* which ones to enter.
Don't want to "waste" your free time? DONT ENTER.
It's not rocket science.

I can see why you're doing it, to save money. I can understand that. At the end of the day it has to come out of someone's pocket and I don't see anyone here opening their wallet.

As an alternative if this 'competition' doesn't work out, you could find some to-buy icons/icon sets and then see if the community would be willing to donate to purchase them?

There's plenty of freebies on the Internet anyways: http://www.freeiconsweb.com/

The entire Tango icon set has been made... For free. Without even ANY reward. So, what is your issue here? There are enough people out there who *enjoy* making icons (I am actually one of those, I am making my own iconset, but that one isn't suitable for OSNews), and are more than willing to do it for free.

In fact, I know enough graphic designers who would create those icons for OSNews for free, just out of being nice. However, I chose to make a nice contest out of it, giving everybody an equal chance - even people I do not know.

I do it to be nice, but if you don't appreciate that, fine. Just please don't come off as an ass doing so.

They did have programming related contests before, nobody is being discriminated... Hiring a professional to draw a handful of symbols is clearly overkill and the chances are actually very good that they'll receive a decent set of icons. Heck the only reason I don't try it myself for fun is, that I'm quite sure that someone else will submit a better effort.

when you put it that way, it's hard not to feel bugged for the icon designers. Stuff like the tango project, everaldo's work, and I'm sure the oxygen project (when we see it) is much, MUCH more than a handful of symbols.

I believe he was talking about the OSNews Icons. I, too, believe it is kinda overkill to hire a professional to draw like 10 to 15 icons, just so the site will look a bit better ? Perhaps less than that...

It is like hiring a professional programmer to help you optimize some code in a script for an excel file...

You realize thats how it works with code too, even if its not as formalized of a contest (or sometimes, it is)... for example, gnome had its gnome bounties projects where they had things they wanted done for certain applications, and the person to implement it the best got the money and the code went into that application. The rest of the code was thrown out. Also, for little (bragging rights, ability to put it on a resume?) to no reward, the recent scheduler issue in the linux kernel had competition between a few people creating different schedulers. The code that was not chosen for inclusion in the kernel was thrown out. Relax, its not just graphic designers. I did an unpaid internship a few summers ago, creating a 3D models of quite a few different things for a simulation program, and after I completed the internship, a large amount of what I did was thrown out and contracted out to be completed to be done overseas.

This happens everywhere. It should be an expected part of life in a world run without a dictatorship.

They're not treating graphic designres like crap, they're treating enthusiastic amateurs like (badly paid) graphic designers. You get what you pay for.

Still, it's only a handful of icons. Could look good on some student's CV. Was never gonna make anyone rich.

That sounds like a pretty good point to me.

Sure, why not?

A while ago the Banshee project had a contest to write a plug-in to implement the "mini mode" sported by most other media players. The "prize" was something like a mention on the project leader's blog, and a beer if they ever happened to be in the same place.

Were they taking programmers for granted? Were they insulting programmers by offering such a small reward? Should they have contracted a professional programmer, rather than relying on "poor/stupid freelancers"? What about the people who lost? Screw them?



In my experience, people contributing icons and other graphics are respected (and thanked) just as much as other volunteers who give up their free time to programme, create packages, write documentation, administer websites, triage bugs, and so on.

Because treatment -as- crap, where license is taken and resold to appear in a hideously composed ad later, and the attribution for the hideous part falsely given to the icon author, does not work on her Smartphone?

She waived the entry fee! What do you want? Jet service to the Venice Biennialle 32x32 (and under)? Should we donate 7000 lira to the cause of good vegetarian ricotta? The cover of Oprah Magazine for 3 months?

Ah...no wait, I get it; she is trying to only occupy the time of -bad- designers, otherwise out there making boxy solar designs that look like a 2004 Cadillac is parked in the attic, hiding from Deceptacons.

I agree with you 100%.

It infuriated me with my current employer when I started. I had to redesign a web app that we sold to make it nicer and more functional. All well and good but I'm no graphic designer and when I asked for some money to buy decent icons or to get one of our associated graphic designers to do some I was told to go find some freebies online.

Why oh why is graphic design relegated so often to this dirty tail ender option...?

"contract a professional designer, don't rely of poor/stupid freelancers."

Nice job tarnishing the freelancers. Btw, what in the hell has this got to do with OSS?

"What about the others who "lost"? Screw them?"

They still own their work so they can do whatever they want with it. If you cant handle losing, dont join a competition.

Hopefully your attitude isn't typical for a graphic designer otherwise, well, maybe the problem isn't on the OSS side.

I disagree. Especially for starting graphics designers this contest could be an add or a start for a portfolio.

Just as it is hard for beginning game developers to get a job at the game developer companies without experience.

OpenSource can be a great step stone. In addition i imagine a slashdot icon like icon of B.Gates with borg spectacles for anything MS related :-)

Edited 2007-09-17 05:56

Mmm, they are very unclear about it. The previews are licensed under the noderiv-nc license until KDE4.0 comes out... But the icons themselves are ccsa? It's getting confusing.

Well, it's Tango anyway. They fit better with OSNews too.

> they are very unclear about it.

from the webpage:

"Oxygen icon theme is dual licensed. You may copy it under the Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License or the GNU Library General Public License."

not sure what's unclear about that.

The unclarity stems from this:



Seeing KDE4 isn't out yet, I figured the icons were not to be used yet. On top of that, we cannot really afford to be uncertain about these matters. The Tango guys have their set out, with one, clear, license, and that made the difference on the license part of the story.

In addition comes the aesthetics side of it; even though I personally really love the Oxygen set, it just doesn't fit OSNews as well as the Tango icons do.

Edited 2007-09-17 10:59 UTC

Well, the PNG icons could be photos of real objects, such as a present box, a database (a filing cabinet?), a squished bug, a tree dimensional object (with proper angle at taking the photo), a judge, a guy with headphones, two guys discussing, a stop watch and and a cell phone... oh, and why have static icons? Let's embed video clips instead of icons! "Flash" videos! Stupid idea, I know and I'll stop kidding for now. :-)

About the format: Yes, PNG would surely be a better choice than GIF.

OSNews asks for GIFs because I can easily optimize them for smaller filesizes than PNGs, because that's important for our cellphone support. The artists are free to export in SVG/PNG for other uses.

I'd say that's not entirely true; have a look at the link below. It helps clarify why PNGs tend to be larger:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#File_size_an...

For the older, coarser, more jagged icons that may have been the case, but not anymore. Filesize of .pngs in comparison to .gifs of icons downloaded from the front page and converted in gimp:

09 - 75.8%
19 - 84.6%
28 - 63.9%
31 - 77.6%
32 - 103.3%
37 - 101.0%
45 - 66.0%
47 - 75.5%
71 - 110.5%*
78 - 90.6%

*significantly coarse, unlike most of the new icons (edit: it's the bsd icon)

Edited 2007-09-17 02:26

Ditto for the Wii. It's got a full Opera browser, even flash - it can handle the real site. The mobile version is just useless; the Opera Wii isn't a 'mobile' browser.

I agree whole-heartedly.

But you say Mozilla based? Try about:config and search for general.useragent You should be able to override your useragent, yeah, it sucks to have to resort to that.

I think what we'll do is make an alternate URL that will disregard the user agent and override our mobile design for those who want the full version regardless of their device. Thanks for the idea.

I chose to have all the icons from the same icon set to create a more consistent feel across OSNews. We were using all sorts of different icons, a mish-mash of styles, and I hated it. We needed icons with a consistent feel - consistent colours, lighting, and overall style.

So, logically, the icons we want must follow the same Tango guidelines as closely as possible.

I meant a /full/ icon set. i.e. let the artist, if they choose, implement every topic icon so that they don't have to follow Tango guidelines, but still maintain a consistent style across all icons according to their chosen design.

Erm, most of our icons, as explained, cannot be redesigned. They are logos from companies and projects, and they will not change (unless the company itself changes logos).

The Tango set fit in perfectly, so why duplicate efforts? As a graphics artist, you'll need to learn to work according to guidelines anyway.

As a paid graphics artist, I work within guidelines; as an unpaid graphics artist, I show what I'm capable of I already had an idea for dealing with the company logos anyway.

Aren't you using AdBlock+, pal?

Do you ever stop whining? It's unattractive.

We don't resize our icons, so that benefit is useless. On top of that, svg support is not universal, while gif support is.

People always forgot we need to render everywhere.

Edited 2007-09-17 14:02 UTC

You don't resize icons, but users do - they enlarge page to read text. At least I do . Which browsers do not support svg? I'm not talking about IE, but web browsers.

Internet Explorer definitely is a major concern. Out in the real world, IE is still the number one browser, and we need to support it fully.

But what about Net+? Voyager? PocketIE? Opera Mini? Netfront? OpenWave? And on top of that, even Firefox's, Safari's, Konqueror's, and so on, SVG support is NOT complete, while they DO support GIF *all the way*.

The choice for GIF is one that is absolutely non-negotiable. We're not a small weblog that needs to render in just Gecko, WebCore and IE - we render on everything, with everything, everywhere. PNG is even 100% out of the question, let alone SVG.

Are you stupid? IE is the most widely used web browser. If you don't render properly in IE, go get another job.

The fact that it is the most used web browser doesn't imply that it is the most capable one. SVG might be a relatively new standard, but IE completely fails to render properly nearly 10 years old such as CSS2. It is sad that webdesigners* have to work their way around this stupid thing in order to make decent looking websites...

* When I say webdesigners, I mean the good ones and not the guys that use FrontPage to make their stuff, by the way.

That's actually not bad . The yellow glare is a bit pointless though, and you might want to make its body a bit less 'puffy'.

Still, not bad.

Everybody can make the icons in whatever file format they want - as long as the icon they send to us is a 32x32 GIF image.