Artwork project

Artwork project is a project dedicated to coming up with a new logo, icons, and pictures. Not to be confused with Artwork page which captures the current state of the art ;) . See also Artwork_Guidelines which describe the current agreed-upon rules.

This project is more of an experiment, to not be constrained by the current artwork guidelines set in stone many years ago.

Rationale

Every once in a while a new contributor proposes a new logo or icon. This page is meant to track those proposals and discussions around them.

Requirements

Artwork_Guidelines captures the current guidelines. This section proposes a simplified version of those.

Size and format

As there are various screen sizes and contexts, the artwork needs to be scalable. To achieve this scalability all icons must be done in the vector (SVG) format. Splash screens, OTOH are allowed to be raster graphics. At the same time, splash screens should be provided with several resolutions, according to HiDPI support guidelines.

Color scheme

As discussed in the section below, colors should be decided separately from the artwork. The artwork format should support an easy re-coloring so that it be consistent with brand colors (once we come up with such a color scheme).

As Qt doesn't support SVG selectors, a set of icons embedded into FreeCAD distribution should have the colors either hardcoded or replaced in runtime.

Logo proposals

A new logo proposal comes up quite often. Even though there's a dedicated thread people for proposals, people open a new thread for their own work.

Proposals can be divided into several categories:

A variation of traditional design with F and the gear
An updated traditional design with F and C stylized as caliper and the gear
Geometrical flat figures representing F and C
F, C, gear depicted in 3D
Abstract ideas, not obviously related to F, C, gear

Survey

There was a proposal to get quantified feedback. Several solutions were proposed to gather it, from manually gathering votes in the spreadsheet to automated systems.

The simplest way to set up a survey is by using the SurveyMonkey service: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MKFDZQX

Some contributors forcefully reject the idea of voting, advocating the delegation of the right to decide on Artwork to those who have administrators rights to merge pull requests (mainly yorik and wmayer).

Artwork

Artwork is proposed less often as there are dozens and hundreds of icons in FreeCAD. Only a few people dared to try this. The traditional artwork is done by a single man years ago. There are currently 2 proposals in progress.

Color palettes

Colors are quite an important part of branding. Unique colors are subconsciously associate the product with a brand in the mind of a user. Since artwork proposals are of various color schemes, we need to come up with an easy way to apply a color theme to icons once we establish it.

Currently, there are hundreds of different colors and gradients in the existing artwork. A successful color scheme only needs a dozen: 3-4 main colors, black, white, and shades of each.

Traditional

				Use the Yellow tones for tools that create objects; for an example, see Part and Draft Workbenches.
				Use the Blue tones for tools that modify objects; for an example, see Part and Draft Workbenches.
				Use the Teal tones for view-related tools; for an example, see the View Menu.
				Use the Red tones for Constraint related tools; for an example, see Sketcher Workbench.

The current color palette is captured in google drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_xxY57wUEV-RWNaMHV2OGpoY00/view

External links

GitHub

Icon themes workbench

Figma

Forum threads

Logo

Icon