creative blog

…and it was hell of a good run! Great group of people got together today on #tango and we were drawing like there was no tomorrow. There were 199 icons created in one day.

I will not rather name anyone of you who made this possible because I would forget someone for sure
Update: Who was there drawing: Jakub Steiner, Steven Garrity, Tuomas Kuosmanen, Andreas Nilsson, Lapo Calamandrei, Josef Vybiral(me myself), Hylke Bons, Charavel Olivier, Kalle Persson and David Prieto

It was wonderfull to feel that artistic “mojo” floating around! If anyone wants to know who everyone ran this icon marathon, check the Tango Fridays page and Graphicsplanet to see what great stuff has been done. Yeeeehaaaa!

Preview of gtk stock icons
(original composition by Jakub “jimmac” Steiner)

Links:

• Hylke Bons
• Steven Garrity
• Jakub Steiner
• Tuomas Kuosmanen
• Andreas Nilsson
• more links will come

It is hell of a challenge to re-create all 193 stock icons for GTK+ toolkit, but I am joining the quest to do it!

And you, yes You my dear reader, if you have artistic skills and had ever have a thought about joining Tango or GNOME projects, this would be a good time to join and help with this icon drawing marathon. (So we can make it all in one day and go home to our beloved wifes and girlfriends right at the friday evening )

I’ve been searching for a suitable theme for my SE K750i since I’ve bought it and now, I’ve done it myself. I dedicate this theme to all Tango desktop project members with this(or similar) wonderfull phones from Sony Ericsson By clicking the thumbnail, you’ll see the set of all screens. It is first release of this theme and I will improve it in the future, so stay tuned!

Download now!

Evolution of Network proxy icon

For this tango friday, I took a quest on finding better metaphor for network proxy applet in gnome control center. This is the story how the metaphor evolved and where it ended

If you look over the Internet, the “internet proxy” or “network proxy” in images and schemes usually use a wall or a general computer/server metaphor. It is good when the proxy has also a firewall inside or when it is in the scheme and has a description.

Not a good metaphor The next was a series of “Just another globe”(TM) styled icons, one inspired by Apple’s icon or network configuration and the last one inspired by the icon used in Tango icon theme for the same purpose.

Then some brain damage happened to me and this icon appeared After Jimmac’s suggestion, the wire on the right side was added.

Based on these, the final icon was created Added some colours, line enhancements etc… et voila! Icon created, packed (renamed as gnome-network-preferences as Dobey suggested and sent to bugzilla)

Update 17. 02. 2007: I’ve just beaten another c-c bug, the icon for sound applet

Sound preferences icon

Now the icon waits for GO/NO-GO result

Today, my new Wacom Graphire 4 Classic XL arrived at 10 a.m. This silver coloured, A5 sized drawing tablet took a while to get it working under Ubuntu Dapper Drake but with a few tutorials and help from Luciash, everything works without much problems.

First thing I’ve ever drawn with graphics tablet (Created in Inkscape)

The Friday of 12th January was not officially marked as the “Tango Friday” but there was one request on the tango-artists mailing list that attracted my attention. Steven Garrity sent there a request for an icon for Meld application. Meld describes itself as visual diff and merge tool and judging from screenshots, it looks really like a helpful application for developers. To be honest, at the first moment I wanted to make an icon of Vulcan mind meld process but that is not much following GNOME HIG, so I did “only” a tangoified version of the current logo in their SVN (thanks go also to Lapo Calamandrei and other Tango artists for comments).

Lately I had less then a little time to blog about things that happened. Now it is not different tho. Actually, I am working on one website for a client and development of two another sites is going to start soon. Not speaking about other office jobs. So there are no new illustrations or paintings I can post probably until the end of February; I only can swear that I practise and hopefully I will post some updates of Oscar and his Friends at that time.

Gajim 0.11 - New default icon theme

Among the news I would like the world to know are, on the first place, new icons and logo for GAJIM Jabber client. Thanks to all of you who encouraged me to finish the set and also to developers for their support and that they included it as a new default set. The set is based on the logo proposal I posted some time ago and contains updated icons for other jabber transports and a new set of emoticons in two sizes too. If you want to see it in action, go and grab and test the new version!

Listed on graphics planet

I just want to say Hi to the graphicsplanet.org because I did not say it when I started to be syndicated there. So, Hello planet!

Inkscape 0.45 - 3, 2, 1, hunt!

Inkscape is also one of tasks that keep me a bit busy these days. The new version’s freeze stage is nearing, bugs are being hunted and reviewed, and with luck also solved, so we need everyone’s hand! If you have some time and skills, please help us to sort out and review bugs, we want to hit 300 points before the strings’ freeze. (I’ve got 6 points already )

Actual screenshot

Actual screenshot reflects my actual mood (if anyone knows author of the image I used, tell me, I will give him a credit!). Other parts of the desktop are using Gillouche theme for GTK and for Metacity too. You can see asome icons of a new theme for Gajim there too.

P.S. I’ve got a new battery for my IBM R51 Laptop! 9 cells, 74000mAh, 4:45 hours of working time!

Yesterday, it was a wonderfull Tango friday! Lots of people came to #tango and danced around icons with us. I would like to shout glory to all knights who participated on this quest and created new icons for applications reported bellow Sir Andreas’ blogpost. We all together fought like lions and enjoyed the whole day.

You can see all new icons we created yesterday at special Tango Fridays’ page. Now these icons are going to be sent to relevant people who care about packages/applications and we can only hope they will be accepted

At the end, a nice suggestion has been made by hbons, to make Tango friday each first friday of the month. As he trully said, it would speed up things rapidly

Andreas started that, Jimmac joined and declared war on fuzzyness too, and it looks like there will be a huge amount of work to do with all those fuzzy icons so, I am the another knight in this quest! For a start, I have already done two icons that I wanted to give some Tango love to, Labyrinth (mind mapping tool, and Gajim (Jabber client). Both are sent to developers now, but feel free to comment them.

I am back in the astronomy world After a year, an astronomy course takes place on Hvězdárna a planetárium Johana Palisy in Ostrava again. And this time I will finish it succesfully, I promise!

For the beginning, I’ve created two astronomy related wallpapers, one is a bit modified photography of Cassiopea constellation(with a nice story which I will write about after some time) and the second one is digitally drawn illustration of a comet and a star in the Milky way. I hope someone will enjoy these wallpapers as well as I enjoy astronomy lessons

Update: one new comet done to test how does tutorials from deviantart.com about creation of planet work in GIMP