Inspiration is bad
Update 26/Sep/07: Icon have been committed to KDE svn. Usuallly inspiration is good but it’s bad if it’s 7 in the morning and you worked all night long just because you felt you was inspired. Don’t know if this is normal but sometimes when I see a really inspiring icon design I can’t think to do anything else if not drawing a gorgeous icon as well. Thanks Nuno!So, it was sunday night (or better, monday morning) and I couldn’t go to bed because I had to draw something. I knew I would have to wake up at 8 because of an appointment but … Hey, I was feeling inspired. :)
The icon that got my attention this time was nothing less than Konqueror web browser. This is one of those icons that we are afraid to do because are very popular applications. I had this idea in mind since some time already: Nothing totally new for Konqueror, it’s the usual globe plus cog but it had to be fit better the Oxygen application icons style. So I put the cog on a compatible 3D perspective and used a shiny nice globe. The cog now looks more like a base for the globe and the stars on the globe form a subtle “K” constellation. This one was a really tough icon with many reflections, and transparencies, but I’m kinda happy with the overall result. The icon scales down very well and has distinctive shape. As always, some retouches might happen before KDE 4. Peace.
You are geniuses! Subtle yet striking, love it!
Wow, kudos, this looks very good.
I also like very much the icon Nuno just blogged about.
Wow! That was worth a sleepness night. The icon looks really good!
Now I can’t sleep anymore. Just nice and shiny! I love it.
I love it! :D
Great!! Your a genius, A++ beautiful work, dont ever sleep :-)
whoa!! I looove it! My favorite app + a totally awesome icon. What more can I ask for!
Actually, I can ask for more icons! :)
Keep up the awesomeness! :)
Holy crap that’s magnificent.
[ENG]
Oh my god, that’s absolutely great !! It’s a beautiful icon, in the future i will use Konqueror 4.x just because of this cool work ;-). Keep it up man !
[ITA]
David quando disegni questi capolavori mostri tutto il tuo talento. Decisamente migliore di qualsiasi altra icona per Konqueror al momento in SVN, non so in base a cosa farete una scelta ma questa è fantastica..
Complimenti !
Ecas
Wow, what a great piece of graphic work you have there. I really wish my creative centers worked so well with or without sleep. I can’t wait until Kubuntu Gutsy comes out so I can experience KDE 4 and it’s awesomeness. Again, great job!!!
I really like it, except for one thing: the constellation. My problem with it is that it looks like the Orion constellation (a good thing) except that it’s missing one star in the belt! So can you either put in the third star, or re-arrange it so that it doesn’t look quite so much like Orion? I like the idea of a constellation (konstellation :), and the idea of a subtle K, but that one missing star just annoys my inner astronomer! :)
buaaaaaaa :D my God its stuning great great work dude.
The “stars aligned as K” are a really nice touch. The K is, however, hard to recognize if you don’t know what you’re looking for. It also looks very fragile or, uhm faint(?). So I guess I’d like the icon even better if the stars were bigger.
Anyway, I didn’t realize that we didn’t have a Konqueror icon yet and I’m happy with that one :D
Really impressive. I love it
I think you should change the title to “Inspiration is a good thing”. Because that is the truth, at least for egocentric users (like myself ;) who now has a new shiny icon to drool over.
I love the idea of a globe floating over a cog, and the result is superb! Only one small complaint: I think the globe should be smaller in the smaller icons (especially
About Orion:
That could be fixed with one small star at the point where the lines cross, or by seperating teh big star into two smaller overlapping stars.
See:
- picture: http://www.gb.nrao.edu/~rmaddale/Education/OrionTourCenter/optical.html
- description of the nebula: http://astro.nineplanets.org/twn/n1976x.html
“The Orion Nebula is the nearest star formation region to the Earth and consequently particularly well studied.” … “The Orion Nebula is actually just part of a much larger cloud that covers most of the constellation of Orion.”
- description of the constellation: http://www.seds.org/Maps/Stars_en/Fig/orion.html
- mythology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(mythology)
“Orion was a great huntsman of Greek mythology who was placed among the stars as the constellation of Orion.” … “Orion served several roles in ancient Greek culture. The story of the adventures of Orion, the hunter, is the most supported (and even that not very strongly). He is also the personification of the constellation of the same name. In addition, he was venerated as a hero, in the Greek sense, in the region of Boeotia…”
And there’s a K in him ;)
Stunning :-)
Enlightening icon!!! Really nice!! I really feel we have the best artists team in the whole history of open source!!
Just awesome. I’m looking forward to the relaunch of the new Oxygen page :)
Man, that is great. So fare the best Konqueror-Icon I’ve ever seen and also one of the best oxygen icons.
Even though I have a little comment about it. I don’t like the arangement of the stars so much. It’s a little too busy and nervous I gues. Especially the junktion where all the lines meet eachother.
But anyway, this is awesome work.
for christs sake, commit it to svn NOW! i wanna see the svg! :D
Great work, that’s gorgeous.
This is extremely beautiful.
I personally don’t like it - it’s way too grey, I think.
Just a little bit more contrast and its perfect :)
Once again: A M A Z I N G job !!!
It’s looks nice :) I think the globe should be a little bit deeper inside the cog.
Awesome!
An idea for you (David):
Take this icon, and have the stars in the constellation twinkling or strobing or something for the ‘page download in progress’ icon animation… That’d be pretty slick :) It’s just an idea which might be useful.
Lovely icon :)
@Troy:
Noes! That would really decrease the usability of Konqueror - I would just repeatedly hit F5 and staring at the animated icon instead of doing what I should do. ;)
[...] sono un paio di icone nuove di zecca, tra cui questa, simpaticamente presentata da David Vignoni¹, dell’applicazione più importante di KDE: Konqueror, che dimostrano una cura e [...]
reminds me of Omiweb
i don’t like it
Parece una teta azul :D (it looks like a blue tit :D)
Take Back Th’a Web, Get the new browser! BlueBoobs 1.0! :D
Hey, I was just wondering if you would divulge what kind of programs you use to make these. You’re great at it, and I’m pretty interested in experimenting around.
Thanks!
-Aug H.
Hey Hey,
I like the large icon minus the blue on the cog. the 64×64 looks the best to me.
Out of the 26,687 visitors this month to the website I’m doing SEO/M for; Oncorp.com, only three use the Konqueror browser. I personally like Mozilla’s Firefox.
Top listing on Digg.com pretty good, I guess that’s worth not sleeping. I hope you are a search marketer as well as a designer.
Hi, very, very nice. Altho I think globe more in, than over the gear would look a little nicer. Just my 2 cents. Tumbs up! ;)
FA-VO-LO-SA!
Ottimo lavoro :)
What programs did you use to create this?
Man, that is stunning, excellent work!
Just awesome !
Absolutely lovely. We’re glad you stayed up all night! Can’t wait for the final 4.0 release.
I think it’s excellent and amazing.
Great work!
I loved this icon! &;-)
Nice work. The only thing that looks a little out of place is the glow of the globe. If the globe was centered inside, wouldn’t the glow be even around the cog? Right now it hits strong in 3 areas, which makes it look like the glow isn’t 3d, but applied on top of a 2d circle (the globe).
Just an idea.
Oh when I meant glow, I guess I meant the blue refection (in case that was confusing). :-)
Beautiful!
Oh look, a lame copy of Apple’s .mac icon! Original:
http://blog.tice.de/a_pics/big_icons/dotmac.png
BTW:
Stars on the globe? WTF?!? Stars? On the globe?
The .mac icon also has “stars”, but they represent network nodes.
I liked the old one better.
@ Markus
haha. no comment on such a stupid provocation.
Very nice icon, but it reminds me the agricultural dome from Outpost game :).
@ Trevor
Well, the globe is just a sort of luminescent ball. This icon is like an unrealistic object (I never saw a globe on cog) drawn with Oxygen realistic design approach. The reason why the blue reflection is not just circular but broken in 3 is because I wanted to give the impression the globe light is not uniform, so don’t think it as a fixed neon light.
@ Darren St.Romain
I really like the reflections, it gives the feeling the globe is luminescent or that the cog is made a reflective metal.
Not sure what you mean but I’ll keep the compliments. Thanks.
@ Fabio (maniac)
LOL … but you are sick to think that! :)
@ Aug H.
I combine Illustrator CS2 powerful tools to Inkscape SVG awesomeness. In Illustrator I can do many things that in Inkscape would be impossible to do easily and then I complete the icon in Inkscape that allow me to use cool SVG effects like blur and fill-to-transparent gradients that are not easy to do in Illustrator.
@ WishMaster
Fortunally you are one of the few to not like it and maybe the icon is too blue, not too grey!
@ Peter, Arne Babenhauserheide
The constellation it’s just a detail, it was not even my intention to imitate Orion. But thanks for teaching us something about stars, I personally can only recognize the great bear constellation :)
@ ALL the positive commenter
Thank a lot, your appreciation. All the appreciations comments and constructive critiques is what feed my inspiration to continue doing better and better. Thanks!
excellent..just love it..
You shouldn’t just appreciate the positive comments. Take note of what Markus said - it does look almost exactly like the .Mac icon turned on the side. You could do a number of things to fix this.
SuitCase It dos not look like the mac icon at all, there are copies of that icon a bit all over the place some actuly made before mac did his, its a well know visual methafore.
Still if it does look like it, then we cant do anything cause everything looks like something.
Looks really great!!! :D
@ SuitCase
First off: with “positive” I mean “constructive”.
Your comment and Marcus comment and few others are just provocations because this icon apart having a blue globe and few shiny reflections that look like stars to form a “K” is totally different from the icon .MAC. If you say the contrary I understand you have no idea or you are just trolling. As Nuno said, it’s plenty of real rip-off of the .MAC icon around but that’s certainly not. Ask Apple if you want, I’m sure their designer will agree with me.
Really nice icon,
it would be perfect if you could somehow project the continents on the globe (or maby just the outline), of cource just very very discreet. I imagine something like Nuno did here for the world clock: http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/rect4744.png
Absolutely brilliant!
Congratulations.
> the stars on the globe form a subtle “K� constellation
Good that you wrote about it. I wouldn’t notice “K”. Think about doing it so it’s more obvious :)
What’s up with the light and shadows? Do a paper mock-up and point light at it ;) Everything else is pretty good.
I love it! The glow from the globe onto the cog is awesome!
Markus’ comment was somewhat constructive, I felt, as it did give you a valid criticism. Maybe you thought it rude, but it wasn’t just “It sucks” and nothing else.
You need to either explain or remove the stars on the globe (..stars on a globe?) and consider tweaking the colours so it doesn’t look exactly like the .Mac icon. It is a metaphor used across several icons, yes, but it’s remarkable how similar yours is to the .Mac one.. you should do what you can to differentiate that.
To add some of my own criticism (to be “constructive”) I think the transparency is gratuitous and the cog outline makes it look like the globe has a ring around it when combined with the equator line.
@SuitCase
On Markus comment I really disagree, because he is saying this icon is a rip-off of .MAC icon, while It’s clear is not. And if you want to point this icon to Apple go on, I’m totally confident they would agree with me. If this icon is rip-off, every icon with a blue sphere in it would be a rip-off.
- The lines in the .MAC icon are kinda random and represent network connections, while, the lines in this icon are the ones used to map the earth globe.
- The way I did the gradients is totally different and the color, blue, is linked to the globe color Konqueror icon always had. So, for all this reasons, coming here to say the icon is a rip-off .MAC icon is for me just a provocation made by someone that do not know what he is talking about.
- The stars in the .MAC icon represent networks node. In my icon are just a few light concentrated in one side of the globe that with little imagination can look like a K constellation, it’s just a detail.
For all this reasons and the fact here there is a cog as base: this icon is totally different from .MAC icon, and if you insist I’ll think your are trolling or that you may be partially blind.
About your new comments: OK, I now know you don’t like the way I did the icon, but that’s doesn’t matter very much to me. I interpreted the icon as I wanted to and I’m pretty happy with the result. If the Konqueror developers won’t like it that would be different.
@ Dimitry
Sorry, I haven’t understood what you mean. I don’t see anything wrong with shadows and glows.
@ Wiggles
Thanks, I really like it too :) The idea was to give the sensation the globe is a sort of table light but I think you can even think it as the natural reflection of the very blue globe on a reflective material like the one the cog is made of.
[...] I know, meebo.com still not allowing Konqueror :) I’ve been able to enter the site by changing the browser agent but seems the site ajax [...]
I think you take criticism badly, and that your icon is flawed. That’s all I’ll say further, as you clearly have no interest in looking at changing it or coming up with a better rationale for certain insane things than “it’s a detail”.
@SuitCase
Right, I’m happy as it is now, thanks.
After reading all of the other comments, I have to say, that looks nothing like the Mac icon. The only resemblance I see is the blue color (although different shades and lighting) and spherical shape (an Earth in the shape of a cube just doesn’t seem right).
Love your work David.
[...] image and save it as a local PNG file. For example, if you’re interested in more details on the new Konqueror icon, here is what you’ll [...]
[...] read more | digg story [...]
Congratulations on creating a very impressive icon. As for similarities with the .Mac icon, the only resemblance I can see is the blue globe. Apart from that they’re not alike at all.
Apple is hardly the first company to make use of a blue sphere in it’s artwork.