Nectarine

sebonpsp and zoner: "Purely in my opinion: I'm not a fan of the icon for "Custom" like in "Amiga Custom". I wouldn't put anything, just the Amiga logo." --> I tried a few things here, like a jigsaw piece, and a lightning bolt: I wanted to separate "custom X" from "normal X". In the end I chose that circuitry icon because it suggests special programming. If everyone hates it then we can lose it, but then it becomes hard to distinguish "known" Amiga formats like MOD from "custom" Amiga formats. Thoughts? Remember that the point of this exercise is to make platforms *visually* distinguishable.

vikingr84: "fonts bigger/broader for reading purposes": YES! I think we need to anti-alias them in some way. The old black chips all looked the same, but the text was smooth and bold. My current icon text is too thin and jagged, I agree.

vikingr84: "chip somehow with fewer alpha, more transparacy; logos a bit more little while maybe greyed out; the fonts could be fitting to the chip, that means they have to be 3-dimensional recreated for the angle the chip stands; more focus on the font, some logo and of course not so big chip itself [...]"
* I don't really understand this. You're probably a better artist than I am, and if you are happy to take over this project then that is great, as long as you can fulfil the original aims of usability (certain colour = certain platform etc.). -- Since you asked, I'm using Paint.NET, really just bashing pixels, nothing clever or professional.

...more...

franz_opa: "I would use "BBC" for BBC's & Master System's soundchip since we probably will not have many Sega Master System songs and "SN76" does not really mean anything." --> As much as I love the BBC Micro I would not want to see SMS songs branded "BBC", bc it's just inaccurate. Especially when this is the first chance to change that YM icon to AY/YM, which properly includes the Spectrum Maybe this deserves some more discussion?

yoruq: posted this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/xu17kk4n3alvg41/necta_icons.png
Looks pretty cool. Unfortunately you didn't explain the rules you used to create them. There are more icons on the left (maybe this is better for consistency -- Stinsen said on the oneliner that he didn't like the inconsistency of design) but some still aren't. How did you decide to make them this way? Again, I'm happy to hand over this project to a better artist, as long as the focus is on user experience and making it quick to "read".

Nate: "MPTM should have the ModPlug logo." OK :>

Rapture: objected to the Renoise icon because it looks like "R: RNS" but should be "XRNS". But I don't agree because the first "R" is the logo (like the "N" Nintendo in the Game Boy icon, or the Atari symbol in the ST icon) and then "RNS" is a separate thing, an abbreviation of the name. It *is* consistent. I had to shorten names for obvious space reasons.

serpent: said that maybe the little pictures (Amiga ball, Atari logo etc.) are too much, and we should keep the old-style text chips but just add a shade of colour to show the "family". I think this is a fair point and might also be worth a trial, 'cause sometimes pictures can be "noisy". But apparently nobody else had this opinion.

Stinsen: objected to some inconsistency. Unfortunately I don't know exactly what he was referring to (colour, size, shape, font/text, whatever). Erm, let me know if you read this

(deleted, posted same thing twice)

> Stinsen: objected to some inconsistency. Unfortunately I don't know exactly what he was referring to (colour, size, shape, font/text, whatever). Erm, let me know if you read this

I do like them generally, the inconsistency remark was about e.g. the odd PC one with icon the the right and the PC/XM/IT ones without icons and centered text.
To me it looks a bit cluttered and hard to "read" when they consistently don't have an icon to the left.
Exceptions like "AY/YM" which fills the entire image feels ok though. But feel free to ignore my rambling...

maybe it doesn't matter to say anything xD i say only "design rulez" are completely ignored
I see mirror is taking this job deeply, that is cool, many ideas etc. but pls look at some certain rulez in fonts space and colors somehow...

My five cents:
I don't think the colors and graphical elements work very well. As the icons are so small, I would prefer a clean, minimalistic, consistent design (= text only). Now it's all over the place - some text only icons, some hybrid, and some graphics only icons. I appreciate the effort put into this, but maybe you could express your artistical skills on some new logos instead?

One thing I would love to see, though, is a blank chip for those songs without a specified platform. Or a chip with a "?" or something? That way we would get beautifully alignes song titles...

Mystra: so you're saying that you prefer the old icon set?

More or less, yeah. At least design-wise. Fonts, background color etc might be improved from the old icon set.

To echo Mystra's sentiments, while I'm OK with these new icons, I do prefer minimalism and I think that the logos on the chips are a bit much. In my humble opinion and wildest dreams, I'd like chips that are more minimal (just the chip and text) and the one improvement would be some color coding per platform family (Atari, Commodore, PC, etc). The colors shouldn't be subtle hues of dark things, but obvious color choices that correspond loosely to a color we associate with the platform. A blank chip for unknown is also definitely a nice touch for the OCD people.

Yes, gfx are nice per se but the space is just too small to have gfx and text. And like mentioned not all have gfx, some have bigger font, some smaller etc.

And yes i would prefer chip icon, text only (with same font size) and different colours for different platform "families".

For my part, I am 100% in favour of the chip-family colour-coding. Logos are cool but I can go either way on those. Happy to have them, wouldn't miss them too much if they were removed, but they add another useful visual element. I also wouldn't mind the colours being more vivid, like zoner suggests, but I'm fine with the subtler ones too.

Okay, so I think the feeling is that the mini-icons on chips are causing some "overcrowding".

Maybe a good idea would be to keep the colour-coding I described in the earlier post (Amiga = orange, PC = purple, 8-bit = green etc.) but drop the icons, and just have text chips (like the old graphics) but with those colours instead of black...?

Would anyone like to try making a test set that we could try out? Hopefully someone who can anti-alias the text nicely, because I know I didn't

Here you can grab the blank chips (with background colours, but no text or logos):
https://cl4.org/_necta/platform_recolour_2019/2019-06_recoloured_chips_blank.zip
But the colours should be made stronger or brighter, because like I said my monitor seems to be configured with too little contrast.

whats about making different iconsets and a function where you can change the set

Well we have got "themes", I guess this is just done by cascading style-sheets, but someone still has to draw the images