Martin Sourada wrote:
I folowed the guidlines and there is said: "The shadow is formed by
lines from the isometric grid. It is appears primarily behind the
object; as well as a bit in front of and under the object. Do not to
use black, as it is too harsh and does not scale well...dark gray is
acceptable."
Do you think, that using black with transparency would be better than
using dark-grey without transparency (save for the blur effect which
adds transparency, of course)?
And yes, it would be good to document the certain values on wiki. But
we must first decide which ones are the best...
The shadow, quickly examined, is a sort of gradient with the darkest
(sometimes solid) color at one end (often closest/touching the object)
and a transition to transparent pixels at the other thus allowing the
sense of integration with the panel, background, and such. The general
guideline provided was to describe my approach of using a dark gray as
the starting point for the shadow's gradient. When creating the initial
icons I often found myself creating far too dark shadows if I started
with black. When creating several of these icons a day, I easily found
my shadows getting darker and darker. Thus starting with a dark gray,
instead of black, helped me take care of this problem and thus my posted
suggestion to other contributors.
What should the values be?
Colors and shapes are relative. Artists should be encouraged to use
their artistic sense in determining relative colors, with the posted
palette as a base guideline. A color determined for one icon might not
work as well for another, thus the value added by artists who can
visually compensate and flexibly combine colors and shapes to create
pieces that work both as an individual icon and as part of the whole
set. An example of this is...system-search...the tilt of the object
requires darker shadows near the handle and a lighter shadow cast by the
glass itself. Compare this icon to any of the others that sit directly
on surface, such as applications-internet, the shadows for those are
slightly darker.
With that said, I am not opposed to further clarifying, correcting, or
expanding the initial guidelines. With specific questions such as the
ones raised about Stars and Pluses, the guidelines can be made to be
more detailed and informative. This is an ongoing project. Presenting
works in progress, runs the risk of missing and inadequate information.
However, these can be constructively discussed, proposed, and remedied.
To address this specific issue, I still stand with my recommendation of
starting with a dark gray instead of black. Due to the blur aspect of
the shadow, it seemed somewhat obvious that the shadow would be
semitransparent...but this can be specifically added in the guidelines
for additional clarity. As for the exact value of dark gray...perhaps
Luya can propose (and Martin or others can confirm) a few Hex Values,
since the shadows on the emotion icons seem to be good starting points.
However, I would like to stress again, that these numbers should really
be used as references, allowing artists the flexibility to tweak as
appropriate from icon to icon.
Diana Fong
---
Red Hat
Visual Designer | Desktop Group
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