NEW ART / LOGO

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Haven't played around too much with this pretty good image generative AI that I have access to, so I decided to throw it my OXT Icon to see how it could spruce it up for me with the right prompts. I had it generated a bunch of different versions. This is one of the better ones, cleaned up a bit and icon-ized.

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[OpenXTalkPaul]

Here's one for a OXT Retro Edition:

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[tperry2x]

I like them both. Very much an improvement, could the lettering stand out more as when the icon is viewed at say 64x64 px, the oxt lettering isn't as noticeable.

[richmond62]

Those are both highly artistic (and I really like the second one), but:
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I have no idea whatsoever those are.

Sorry to be a damp squib, but that 3rd icon (which is in a race to the bottom for artistry) is at least distinguishable.

Here's a fairly crappy offering I just dreamt up (and as it is crappy it should only be used here for demonstration purposes) that shows up at that teeny-weeny size as an OXT standalone:
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[richmond62]

In the Mac dock things are a bit murky as well:
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Someone who has a touch of Daltonism is going to be really stuck.

On the humorous side (please do not take offence): that's a slightly odd-shaped thumbnail:
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[OpenXTalkPaul]

The AI sometimes hallucinates things too, extra fingers, fins/gills, and all sorts of other oddities.

These were generated as 2048x2048 (the largest icon size used by Apple at HiDPI 144ppi), they aren't going to look very readable at 32x32px or 16x16px (smallest icon size) without a lot of help from a human. Most every icon has that problem when you reduce it down that small (1990s icon sizes), the anti-aliasing alone turns letters into blobs. So keeping design simplistic (like LC logo) can really help there. If you really want to support all possible icon formats you have to also make 256 color and 1-bit icons at those smaller sizes (which can be a nightmare to try to do).

I will do some tweaking to the letters at the smaller sizes to try to maintain readability. But I don't want to spend a too much time redesigning logo.

[richmond62]

The AI sometimes hallucinates things too, extra fingers, fins/gills, and all sorts of other oddities.

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This poor fellow is going to end up in trouble because he is NOT holding onto the handlebars, and something very odd indeed is going on with his right foot.

And knowing that that is the standard of A.I. image generation at the moment I would avoid it like the plague (except when getting it to knock together very silly things like the one posted here).

[richmond62]

Most every icon has that problem when you reduce it down that small (1990s icon sizes), the anti-aliasing alone turns letters into blobs.

Knowing that, while it might be very jazzy to have logos like the ones you have had a robot generate as mast-heads for an OXT webpage, it might be better to confine yourself to "rude-and-crude" offerings for icons.
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That's a 'quickie' of my Mac Dock (very similar to the lower panel on any Debian and/or Debian-derivative Linux distros I run), and, as you can see the OXT and the OXTL are, by far the most polychromic icons; a fact that I believe detracts from them.

[richmond62]

Rude-and-crude:
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You may not like them (face it: they are as boring as hell), but . . .
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[richmond62]

You have half a chance of working out what they are when the icons are very small:
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[tperry2x]

We need a trade off between fancy-looking but illegible, and damn ugly.
(Which is what we already have with the existing icons in my opinion). This generative AI art would be better suited to a splash screen, not an icon I think.

This is why my OXT lite icons are 'flat' with minimal shading:

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Whereas the splash icon has more shading and effects applied in comparison:

splash.png (129.47 KiB) Viewed 1714 times

All of this is probably subjective and comes down to people's personal preference.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

We need a trade off between fancy-looking but illegible, and damn ugly.
(Which is what we already have with the existing icons in my opinion). This generative AI art would be better suited to a splash screen, not an icon I think.

This is why my OXT lite icons are 'flat' with minimal shading:
tiny panel.png
desktop.png

Whereas the splash icon has more shading and effects applied in comparison:
splash.png

All of this is probably subjective and comes down to people's personal preference.

I may do a bit more work in this direction. I do want to refresh the art/splash screen a bit.
I can use these as source materials, mix/match bits and pieces of different versions, and tweak appearance to maintain better readability as I reduce size. I made a version down to 16x16 px and was able to ensure I could still read the letters (but the rest of the art was a bit muddied). SVG Vector versions that are more 'Flat' (and uses correct specified color table) could also be made from these. I could also use parts of the flat vector icons that I worked on for helloSystem.

Other options I have played around with are one-color more graphical versions of OXT logos, going more towards the style of 'LC' speech bubble. Having recently research some very old unix keyboards that used to have the now defunct special modifier key called the 'Hyper' key, I like the idea of using the symbol for this key, which looks like a diamond or a 4-point star, as an element in the logo.
I have seen icons designed so that they significantly changed style as the icon goes down to the super-small 16px size. So your 1024 px icon could look photographic while the 16px icon would be just a background shape with the OXT letters.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Here's some older OXT logo designs I just dusted off.
I do like that idea that stacking the O over the X almost makes a stick figure:

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[richmond62]

My criticism of your icons is that as the lettering and the borders are BOTH white, at small scales that may prove problematic:
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[OpenXTalkPaul]

? The design you posted has a white border too?

At sizes as small as 16x16 a white border is a waste of precious limited pixels.
Furthermore to maintain any sort of recognizability you HAVE to take some artistic license at those sizes, even more so to limit design to a 16-color table or 1-bit B&W. It makes me have tremendous respect for the design sense of CAROL KAEHLER (early Mac / HyperCard pixel artist)

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[richmond62]

the design sense of CAROL KAEHLER

SUSAN KARE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare

CAROL KAEHLER wrote a book about HyperCard.

? The design you posted has a white border too?

Yes, it does, but the border and the letters aren't overlapping each other.

[richmond62]

No border and about as derivative as it could be:
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[OpenXTalkPaul]

the design sense of CAROL KAEHLER

SUSAN KARE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare

CAROL KAEHLER, wrote a book about HyperCard.

Oh wow, right, that's who I meant, my bad...
Did KAEHLER Documentation for Apple or something like that?

The overlapping of the letters with no break between them was about trying to do something more interesting than three capital letters of equal size arranged symmetrically.

For the modern icon sizes (up to 1024x1024) we have lots of pixels to work with.
The16x16px version doesn't have to mirror the larger sizes.

I don't find it all that much more readable @ 16x16px size

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[OpenXTalkPaul]

Looks a bit boring sitting in my doc with the others

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