[aprssig] New Icons for APRS software?

[Heikki Hannikainen]

Hi,

Yup, since I was around in Dayton, I thought I had to present something, 
so I announced the slightly unfinished new APRS symbol set rendition.

At different times, I found two different graphic artists from my circles 
around here, who were initially interested, and willing to do it at a 
price that we could agree on. They both agreed to take on the job, but 
apparently were more interested in the more artistically challenging and 
motivating other commitments, and failed to deliver. In the mean time I 
played with Illustrator myself (for an extendend length of time), and came 
up with something that I'm mostly happy with.

A few symbols are still missing, and a few are not quite good yet, so 
expect a release later this summer.

The set is made in Adobe Illustrator. I have a script to export it with a 
single click to transparent PNG at various resolutions (currently it's 
doing 24x24 48x48 64x64 128x128 per symbol). Layout similar to the old 
set, so it's easy to take into use - just adjust the multipliers.

I'll release both the PNGs and the source .ai file (which happens to be 
readable as a PDF, too). Illustrator is a bit expensive, but it's very 
good for this kind of work. There's a free 1-month trial download 
available if you just want to tune something or do custom bitmap exports. 
Inkscape (free) can also open them.

Licensing varies per symbol (and is documented per symbol).

* Those that are my original work: CC-BY-SA (likely)
* Many of those are vector versions of the originals, the original
copyright owner's copyrights probably still hold, whoever that might be 
(I suppose, one of Stephen Smith, Roger Barker, Steve Dimse?).
* A bunch are from Wikimedia Commons, I picked ones which have a suitable
license allowing commercial reuse (PD or such)
* A bunch are SVG symbols from openclipart.org (or based on one), which 
are in the Public Domain.
* Some vendor logos (X, Windows, Apple, Kenwood...) are (c) of the 
vendor. May need to be replaced with something in some use cases.

This should allow use by existing APRS software projects (after maybe 
replacing the vendor logos). Even clearly commercial projects.

It's the old symbol set on steroids, none of Bob's new suggestions have 
been implemented yet (it's a lot of work, and it needs a little review 
first).


On Wed, 21 May 2014, SARTrack Admin wrote:

> The final format is not the point.
> Its about a graphics artist making the icons in a couple of sizes. Generally 
> they would design them at the largest size, then generate the smaller onces 
> (maybe they would have to do some more work to finetune the smaller ones).
>
> They can then be supplied as a collection of .PNG files (in various sizes), 
> and it is extremely simple to generate the final format of them, for example 
> to convert them into ".ico" format, (This is what SARTRack uses, they are 
> then loaded into the program in a 'resource file'), or glue them all together 
> into a block, whatever.
>
> Once the developers have the collection of sepparate image files, they can do 
> whatever they want with them, to make them suitable for import in their 
> program.
>
> I just found the original poster back on this issue; it was Heikki 
> Hannikainen:
>
> ---
>> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 11:55 PM, Heikki Hannikainen <hessu at hes.iki.fi> 
>> wrote:
>>> we'd actually like to have some sort of graphic artist do it for us since
>>> we can't make them pretty enough ourselves.
>> 
>> On Friday I sent an RFP-type email towards one potential source of
>> graphic artist candidates. I'll keep you posted what comes out of it.
>> 
>> I'd start by getting a few example symbols done, and based on review
>> of that (and the technical specs), order the rest. Do the current
>> standard set first, and only then go with extensions.
>> 
>> Emphasis on wide reusability, licensing allowing future development
>> and commercial+noncommercial reuse, easy integration to app build
>> processes (drop in new versions, rebuild, distribute).
>> 
>> - Hessu
>
> Did this pan out??
>
> Bart
>
> -- 
>
> SARTrack Developer and CEO
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   - Hessu