creative blog

How do graphicians relax during the work time? They draw something else than what they have to! Just like I did near the end of work time yesterday. I had to finish 16×16 px icon of airport but had no inspiration. With some consultation with good people of Tango project, two Tango styled animals’ icons were then created The monkey was started for Lapo’s “insert-object” icon and the cow was for Jimmac to show him that the monkey really does not look like a cow Btw, Lapo refined the monkey then to really realistic looking chimp, that guy(and also others from Tango) rocks!

p.s. icons are release under GNU/GPL licence. SVG for them is available in the same place as they are located. You can modify them as much as you want only if you do not hurt any animals. Find those SVGs if you want them

For a last week or so, I had a chance to have some influence to development of YsInfinity launcher application deveolped by Arnaud Vallat. The application is still in early stage of development (the version number is 0.01) but this does not mean that it is highly unstable and unusable, the oposite is the truth.

What does it have that it differs from other applications’ launchers? Well, on the first sight it can look as any MacOS X like looking launchers/docks(this one is not a dock) but there are some differences. Main advantages/difference I see in

• grouping of similar applications into individual groups. You can have several groups around your screen and open only those you need = space saver.
• Another one is low resources’ use, it has even more quick responses than my favourite RK Launcher.
• The third advantage and difference is keyboard navigation. You can use your keyboard to navigate through group of items if you do not have a mouse with scroll wheel which is usually used to choose the launcher when you have mouse.
• And the last, it looks good You can watch some videos about special effects it has on its project page. How it can now look you can see on the screenshot below.

Of course this, let’s say, alpha version has some serious bugs/annoyances sometimes. Those the most important I see are:

• It does not run on Linux(yet )
• It does not even run on every Windows machine(the solution of this is yet unknown because the reason is also unknown.)
• An application is launched by clicking the group’s name or the red button. This is probably not a disadvantage in some cases but if you do not have YsInfinity allways on top and want to raise it above some windows by moving your mouse over it. But it sometimes does not raise and you click it(I’ve launched VideoLanClient 7times because of this )
• It lacks Drag’n'Drop support, for now, so you have to add launchers manually in the shortcuts editor. (It is planned for future versions)

On the other hand, after solving some serious problem and segfaults in even earlier stage, it did not segfault on me yet, probably I am lucky guy

Why did I wrote all this? I think that this piece of software will grow into a nice application, and to speed up this, all possible suggestions and bug reports are important for author of it. So the more users test it the more soon developer can focus on adding new features and solving really important bugs. And the second reason is that the icon of YsInfinity and the red button are my work

In cooperation with DoctorMO, we created 28 domino bricks in #inkscape today, just for FUN! Domino is in Tango style (no, not that drink with oranges ), late it was when I realised that there is no gnome-domino in Gnome Games pack. Hope someone will need it(like DoctorMO’s friend developing Domino game I wish I had a link here! ).

The SVG is available in the same place as the PNG image displayed bellow and bricks are licensed undes Creative Commons Atribution 2.0 licence (means: DoctorMO and I have to be credited if these domino bricks are used somewhere, link to this post is enough )

I just have been drawing some bugs These two will probably not be icons for bug-reporting tool HanzZ is developing but they are still nice to show. I have to give a credit to guys from #tango for feedback . Done entirely in Inkscape.

Note: these drawing are not public domain.

Jana’s aunt and uncle run a breeding station called Šedý vítr (Gray wind) where they breed Flander Bouvier dogs. Because the old website they have is outdated and poorly designed, she decided to redesign the site and put it on better address. Well, as you probably suspect, I am the one who did the design job Jana then converted it into XHTML+CSS+JS and uploaded to new domain http://www.sedyvitr.com. It is finally working now so we can present it to the audience.

Bouvier des Flanders is big but clever breed of dogs suitable also for family with kids(at least they say). The truth is that dogs were kind and happy during the photo session we took to get some good photos for design. You can see some photos of these dogs in photogallery

p.s. the website is completelly in czech language with exception of main page, sorry for english readers.

I am used to use PSI to communicate through jabber service on my Windows box. On my GNU/Linux machine I like GNOME/Xfce more than KDE so I was looking for a jabber client with similar capabilities to PSI but using GTK libs(and not GAIM). And Nomed showed me Gajim jabber client. This client is comparable with PSI in the features area, and has some things more (like tabbed MUC chats ).

What I did not like on the Gajim were icons for icq buddies. After small detective work to find where these icons are stored and a bit of Inkscaping, I’ve created a set which I like and give here to the world. (Who knows, maybe Gajim developers will like it too and will include it in the next version ) Here it is:

Of course I do provide also the package with these icons and instructions how to install. To install simply decompress these icons into /usr/share/gajim/data/iconsets/transports/icq/ directory, restart Gajim and enjoy nice new icons

These icons are released under Creative Commons 2.0 - By GNU GPL v2 licence.

Update: 32×32 and 48×48 icons are ready too now.

Update 2: Relicensed to GNU GPL2.

I’ve finally made myself to redesign this blog and create all other webpages I’ve ever wanted to have here. The blog redesign is done(from 99%, there are some bugs yet), and on topic are other pages of my web. I am adding new pages as soon as I have them working, and I guess it will take me about a week to finish all the stuff. So if something is not working in the way you expect, I am sorry, be patient please

p.s. I know, the new look and feel is a bit infantile, but I like it

A month ago, Arnaud Vallat from the team working on the Toy’d project contacted me with a little request to create a logo for their project…and I agreed Here is the final result of our cooperation.

It was really refreshing to work on graphics for people who really appreciate it(not like for some marketing idiots), so I joined the project and created some another graphics, for web and some wallpapers. Check out on the website.

Basilico is a volume manager application like gnome-vm or ivman which Daniele Favara, a.k.a. nomed, developed for his LiveCD Linux distribution dsslive. The purpose of this application is to handle new and existing drives/storage devices comfortably from the systray of any Freedesktop.org standard compliant desktop environment(designed originally for Xfce). It brings dialogs as similar as in GNOME or KDE but is coded in python and in my opinion less space consuming and nicer

Well, to the point, nomed asked me and Roxville to design an icon for this application, so here it is:

Style is based on the Tango project’s guidelines with scalable version available too. Done in 3 hours mainly thanks to the Roxvile’s music, check out, he is really inspirative musician!

note: icons are NOT public domain

My friend Tomáš Beran asked me to do a graphics for a website of his band orangerecordings. After two proposals which he rejected as too much commercial (they play Drum&Bass and he says that web has to be more “undergroundish”) he sent me some graphics to play with.

Well, I was without any inspiration for a few hours but then it came and I did this mockup:

What is good, that after a few changes he accepted this concept as final version. What is bad, that I do not know how will he transform this into a working website, it will be a little surprise

Those “commercial” versions and full sized final version can be seen at my gallery at deviantart.com.

note: concepts are NOT public domain!