Hello everyone,
A few days ago, I created a page on Patreon to support my work on making new graphics on GCompris. As you may know, last year I started this project, and could make a good start thanks to a little crowd-funding campaign. However there’s a lot of remaining work to finish the task. A lot of activities need to be updated, and new activities will always need some new design and graphics.
So if you want to support GCompris, you can become my patron for this project.
Before resuming my work on the activities, I took the hard and delicate task to update the logo and the main icon of the application.
Now is a good time to have a new icon, for several reasons.
-The old icon had no real meaning, only legacy (which, for a kid that sees GCompris for the first time, doesn’t mean anything)
-Tux is already the mascot of a completely different kind of software. Having him along with other FLOSS mascots inside some activities is cool, but he doesn’t represent enough GCompris to be in the icon.
-The Qt port is still in progress, and it makes sense to have a new icon for it.
-With the new graphics in the application, GCompris needs a good branding that looks good and makes sense.
Also, as some people said they would like to keep the legacy biplane+tux, I tried. I spent countless hours trying to make something looking good, looked at it from every angles. I really couldn’t find a way, and at some point I was feeling like loosing my time.
Full of energy from these failures, I started a new icon from scratch. We had a brainstorm topic on the mailing list recently for a new icon, so I had some indications to begin with. It should mean things like education and gaming, be colorful and cute.
I spare you all the iterations, but after pages of sketches, several proposal and lot of constructive discussions on IRC, here is the final result, along with some explanations:
This is the new icon.
The globe is a symbol for the educational part of GCompris. Also luckily, it is still linked in a way to the idea of the plane from the previous icon. Also it is the same G and orange circle that is used as about button in the main menu.
The dice is a symbol for the gaming part of GCompris, and it also represents counting and maths.
I chose the orange color for the globe for several reasons, probably the most important is because it still contains some yellow from the previous icon, but it is warmer. The blue for the dice adds some contrast.
I tweaked it to follow the main guidelines of Breeze-icon-design, I like the look it gives to it.
This is the new logo with the full name.
It started as a clean-up of the previous one, changing the style and colors of the letters to something soft and colored. Then after making the icon, I added the globe to it, thanks to a suggestion on IRC.
This is a “light” version of the logo, without the globe so it fits better inside a line.
I hope everyone will be happy with this new logo and icon. I know lot of old-timers had some affection for the plane and tux logo, but if you read what I said above, you can see that it was a well considered and discussed change, with lot of good reasons to happen.
Again, if you like my work on GCompris, check this link to see how you can support it. Expect a new activity update next month.
