Oolite Bulletins

phkb wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 8:46 am

I had though by keeping the general icon form but changing colours and style, there was a useful homage to the old while embracing something new!

That's not a bad sentiment IMHO.

FWIW, I'm not convinced by the use of colours, specifically the 'shading'.

Whilst red & blue is a classic combo, here we have the odd scenario of the blue fading to white and the red fading to black.
Also blue saturation increases downwards and red saturation increases inwards, as if they are seperate objects under different lighting.

I'd consider changing from red/black to red/white on the 'head' of the icon (or perhpas just red). I don't think it's such a problem at the base where the eye is seeing everything else darken together.

I'd also consider making the central rectangle (immediately around the word oolite) red too. The pale blue background renders the white letters rather too subtle I think. Additionally the red chevrons look superimposed rather than part of the icon/model/thing and so making the centre red would both link them together and even up the use of the two colours

I might make a quick mock up when I have more time. Meanwhile, a nice first try and you've got us talking.

thread...



let's see one without color, i do like the raised logo with the metallic look...
When scaling the icon the logo seems a pixel to large...

Would the splashscreen be enlarged or remain compact? Coriolis and planet - needs a Cobra too, perhaps.

I was thinking of making the splash screen bigger. It’s small on my normal display, but when I launch the game on my 4K screen the splash screen is minuscule!

<nods> I have my custom splashscreen at 1000x800 - looks much better.

cbr wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 5:56 pm

thread...



let's see one without color, i do like the raised logo with the metallic look...
When scaling the icon the logo seems a pixel to large...

At small scale the letters are harder to read. I wonder if a different metallic color for the letters would improve things.

I will say, I do prefer the desaturated metal surface version more.

phkb wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 8:12 pm

I was thinking of making the splash screen bigger. It’s small on my normal display, but when I launch the game on my 4K screen the splash screen is minuscule!

Again something to consider. Either we provide different sized screens or we have to scale. As a start we could go with the high resolution picture that gets auto-scaled to cover a predefined fraction of the screen. If we notice it looks bad at some sizes we will have to provide smaller images that can be picked in such cases.

hiran wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 9:24 pm

Again something to consider. Either we provide different sized screens or we have to scale. As a start we could go with the high resolution picture that gets auto-scaled to cover a predefined fraction of the screen. If we notice it looks bad at some sizes we will have to provide smaller images that can be picked in such cases.

Gotta narrow down our options first!

Here's a sampler of variations to explore.
With the top three, I followed NiteOwls gold-edged sample, but added a glow effect to git it a bit more pop.
Bottom three are total experiments.

With the red logos, I tried changing the middle bit under the letters to red, and leaving the wings blue, but it looked ever weirder, so I went for the full-red version. However, I think the white/red fade kind of gets washed out towards the tips of the wings, so I tried using black again, but across the whole log (so it goes, black-red-black), and I feel that one works better.


I could probably zoom in a bit more on the Coriolis in first one without the logo, I'm thinking. But the emptiness actually has some appeal. I could also with drop the planet down a bit, so it's not intersecting the letters, or raise it up a bit, so it does it a bit more.

Variants...

cbr wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 9:52 pm

Variants...

cbr, do you want my original paint.net file? I think I can save it as gimp format if that would help. It's got all the layers separated, so you could apply different effects to different layers.

phkb wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 9:42 pm

With the red logos, I tried changing the middle bit under the letters to red, and leaving the wings blue, but it looked ever weirder, so I went for the full-red version. However, I think the white/red fade kind of gets washed out towards the tips of the wings, so I tried using black again, but across the whole log (so it goes, black-red-black), and I feel that one works better.

Agreed, I think the top right image is the best logo that I've seen so far IMHO.

With regards to the lower images, I'd prefer the coriolis but would raise the word oolite to be just clear of the planet surface rather than overlapping with it.

I'm ok with the top right logo but I actually prefer the middle one. I don't think the top right logo will look especially good in other contexts - it really needs a black background for it to make sense.

And for the bottom three, I like each of them in their own way. I wonder would it work to have the ships going up instead of down? Reminds me of those minimalist Star Wars posters, which is a good thing.

Some more variations to bat around. This time, I took all the chevons (top and bottom), gave them a brushed metal look and then turned on a lot of glow


When looking at the icon, I'd do it slightly differently. Taking the current popular choice (black-red-black), this is what the equivalent icon would look like at the various sizes:

Not sure I'd leave the gold border in, now that I look at it a bit closer. Might be better for the icon to just have a white surround.

And a couple more, just for kicks

This one has some appeal, too: