I've started to wonder how exactly we've used the top-face lighting in Echo and how it looks in real life. Looking at the current Echo guidelines (mostly done by me) it looks like this:
And when I sat down and thought about this, it actually looks a bit weird. So I've spent today with estimating (and in case of perspective projection also observating) lighting of cubes and balls and their dropped shadow. I imitated Echo lighting to be approximately caused by light positioned at (3,-3,5) + some amount of homogeneously dispersed light if the cube occupies [0,1]x[0,1]x[0,1] space. Of course, in Echo we don't use realistic lighting and shadows but something that makes the icons more usable. The result looks like this:
So, I wonder what do you folks reading the Fedora (Design) Planet think? It's still not too late to adjust the guidelines for Echo Perspective, albeit for "Old" Echo it would mean that out of blue many icons would violate such guideline…
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6 comments:
The silence is so deafening. Could you produce tiny version of hard drive and also provide the source SVG?
Luya, we've been sketching the harddrive with Thomas some time ago over the IRC, didn't get past the sketches for big size though... The SVG is on my fedorapeople page:
http://mso.fedorapeople.org/echo-perspective/drive-harddisk.svg
But as you can notice, it uses the original lighting for the top face, so depending on whether we'll change the guidelines it would need change.
I don't think we should aim for absolute realism with the icons, they are metaphors needing to send an idea, not a prefect representation.
nicu, I agree on that one. That's why the echo icons have borders, that's why the shadows are heavily simplified. But it's probably good to have some realistic examples to easier grasp how the lighting in echo icons actually works, and the current setting has the top face lighted in the opposite direction...
The illustration you posted on the blog is good enough. Alternately, picking up a object (hard drive) to give a good overview will work too.
Nicu, you mean perfect instead of "prefect". (^o^)
I think your changes to the examples are very good - make them look a little less toony :)
Hope I soon will get some more time to work a bit on the icons again.
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