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Icons are Hard

Today I tried creating a new icon for an RSS reader. I had a pretty good idea and after a few hours of work I got something that I think look pretty good. However, it turns out that I didn’t manage to make the icon look good at 32×32 and my design would not work at all for 16×16.

RSS Icon

Does anyone have any good ideas?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 1st, 2004 at 21:38 and is filed under Mozilla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

12 Responses to “Icons are Hard”

  1. Guilherme Blanco Says:
    August 2nd, 2004 at 5:41

    Seems that you tryed to do a newspaper like icon.

    Try to do the intermediate folder between that gradient in the right side. I think it’ll be much more nicely!

    Does it will be copyrighted? I loved it and if I can, I wanna use it in my project, that you already helped me (this will have a RSS Feed).

  2. Erik Arvidsson Says:
    August 2nd, 2004 at 13:16

    “Try to do the intermediate folder between that gradient in the right side. I think it’ll be much more nicely!”

    What do you mean?

  3. Guilherme Blanco Says:
    August 3rd, 2004 at 3:25

    Simple… can you see the gradient in the right side of your icon?
    Try to do “internal pages”, like other pages in that place… that gradient doesn’t look good there. =)

  4. foO Says:
    August 3rd, 2004 at 18:13

    nice icon, buddy ;)
    how’s that RSS project coming along, btw?

  5. boombastic Says:
    August 12th, 2004 at 16:37

    I am not into icons but i understand you are into RSS application development. I was thinking the other day to write a desktop RSS reader(well web based also makes sense afterall). How are you planning/done the caching of feeds. Lets assume that i defined folders (science/technology) and RSS feeds are sub-node. When user clicks on a feed it will show a listview with the news items, parsed from the XML. But the next time i check for the rss feed what happens? Am i supposed to cache the previous XML, collect new one and compare if there is a new item mark it as bold? If yes do I have to maintain a big XML(for each feed) locally that updates itself after each new retrieval? If yes again then perhaps i need a custom tag in this xml to store the status of read, the folder(child, parent) it belongs to etc.
    Am i making any sense or lost the case?

  6. Elling Says:
    October 15th, 2004 at 11:40

    I guess it’s the small print size of the RSS letters that kind of f*cks things up, since I guess they probably don’t display particularly well at 16×16 at least. :)
    Btw. here’s a tip for getting inspiration on icon design: Do an advanced image search on Google, and choose image size to small:

    http://www.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&imgsz=icon&q=rss+filetype%3Apng

    The result images you get are around icon size…

  7. William Stewart Says:
    November 23rd, 2005 at 20:03

    looks perfect too me. /me grabs and uses for object dock icon

  8. Shraddha Says:
    March 11th, 2006 at 8:57

    Hi,
    This is a nice icon. Currently I am developing a RSS aggregator? Can I use this icon ?
    Please let me know
    Thanks,
    Shraddha

  9. Erik Arvidsson Says:
    March 15th, 2006 at 9:31

    Sure, go ahead. I guess I should CC license this. Does anyone know which license would be appropriate for an icon?

  10. Shraddha Says:
    March 26th, 2006 at 11:56

    Thanks a lot :)
    Shraddha

  11. Ridehard Says:
    June 1st, 2006 at 6:48

    I am 2 years late but hey ^^
    Looks like some people like your icon:
    http://www.macwelt.de/news/netz/335064/

    ps: I was looking for an icon to put on my website too ^^’

  12. Erik Arvidsson Says:
    June 1st, 2006 at 7:56

    Sweet

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