jEmplode candidate icons...

These icons are all done by a graphic designer friend of mine named John Hopkins who recently bought my original 12G off me... I'm taking votes for the next official jEmplode release icon.

...

and more

and last but not least (my favorite)

its a touhg call, either the first or last one.. the last one has a nice feel to it thou.. but the first one repersenst the empeg more..

What do you think to a combination of the first and last icons? Tux in front of buttons? Or Tux behind buttons?
Failing that, I reckon the last one is more individual.

I prefer the first one personally.

I love the silky look and feel of those buttons!!

The only issue with combining them is that this poor icon is going to scale down to 32x32 on windows I'm afraid to see what they look like when they're NOT combined with another.

Mike

Ah - of course. I guess Tux will be your best bet then, as he's still going to look cool.

Nice buttons though. As Mark says, very silky.

I agree... the buttons are my favorite... They could be used for all sorts of icons too...

Tux is great, but Tux alone has nothing empeg-specific on a Linux desktop. Perhaps Tux should be holding a musical note, or wearing headphones, or sitting in front of a car-player, or something?

I agree - as much as I adore Tux, the icon needs to be empeg-specific, and if we can't combine the two gifs acceptably, then my vote would be for the 'buttons' gif.

You're welcome to vote none-of-the-above if you want I can send the comments back to the guy who made him -- Crack the whip and make him go back to the drawing board (literally!)

Mike

I actively dislike them all except for the last one (the buttons).

Because all of those will translate poorly into a tiny Windows 16x16 or 32x32 icon. And besides, the tux bitmap he used was the old one anyway.

I always thought that a large stylized "J", done in the same style as the empeg "e", would be the best.

The very same "E" that my wife always mistakes for IE...

What typeface is the empeg logo?

I actually sat down with one of our graphic artists and a typeface catalog, attempting to answer that very question. I was unable to locate a common typeface that exactly matched the empeg logo. The word "Unofficial" at the top of this BBS screen is the closest I came, and it's not the right one by a long shot.

Rob? Any information on that typeface?

It's an old Acorn Archimedes font. I'm not aware of a TTF equivalent.

Rob

I like the buttons only and the mix Buttons /w/ Tux

It's an old Acorn Archimedes font. I'm not aware of a TTF equivalent.

I've found a font library of acorn fonts including converters. Do you happen to remember the exact name of the font itself?

I like the buttons....kinda...
I'd like to see tux with something empeg like...
or something like Tony is looking into would be cool...

Take a screenshot and upload it to myfonts.com. They charge for font downloads, but with the name you could find it elsewhere.

Tom

Holy cow, didn't know anyone made a service like that.

/me goes to try it out.

Damn, the page is not working. It times out when I try to use the feature, even when I use one of their example images. I have tried in both Netscape and IE.

Sorry, WhatTheFont is temporarily unavailable. Please try back tomorrow.

Damn, it worked a couple days ago!

Tom

Funny that the "temporarily unavailable" message appeared approximately three minutes after I sent them an e-mail message complaining that it timed out.

Oh, wait! Just got this in my mailbox:

"Hello Tony,
Right you are. I've restarted the service. Thanks for pointing it out!
--Christopher Lewis"

Rock.

/me goes to try it again.

Hmm. I couldn't find a good match. Funny, because I've had a lot of luck with that service before.

Tom

WOW. that is an amazing resource. I've needed that a number of times in the past after searching for HOURS for the font i needed. Thanks for that link!

Okay, I tried it, and it worked, but didn't find an exact match in their library.

The "e" is the tricky part, the slanted-upwards middle crossbar is terribly rare. The only comparable font their database found which had the slanted-upward middle crossbar was a serif font. All the others were the usual Futura and Eras variants that I'd already tried by eye.

Still messing with it...

Although it makes me wonder if the slant in the "e" was a deliberate hand-modification to the original font. Many graphic designers will do that sort of thing in a logo...

It's kinda similar to Futura Extra Black Italic if you rotate it counter-clockwise 15 degrees.



Tom

Yes, I did already check it against Futura variants. I don't think it's a variant of Futura because of some of the other letterforms in the font.

this poor icon is going to scale down to 32x32 on windows

If it's not too much trouble, xp supports 48x48. I use that size with my high resolution, and it works pretty good. 32x32 icons look like crap scaled up. More info on icons with xp here.

Oh, and I vote for #5.

Tom

Yeah -- I think the "e", "a", and maybe "g" were modified ... The slanted crossbar doesn't match any of the other letter forms they use (reference = "empeg car"). The "g" i'm not as confident about, but the shortened "hang-down" on the g looks a little different. The line thickness around the center of the "a" is really tight -- doesn't really match the other forms (compare the circles in the "p" and "g" to that of the "a" -- looks like the circle on the "a" is moved to the right). Interestingly, the line thickness of the crossbar of the "e" is roughly equivalent to the suspect part of the "a" -- maybe further support that they were modified? I'm basing my search off an unslanted "e", the "m","p","c", and "r".

This is the closest I've found so far:

http://www.eff.co.uk/A/P/SpmLR.htm

But it's still not right -- The "g" loops too far under, the holes are too big, and the "c" doesn't curve around enough

Mike

Here's another candidate:

http://www.eff.co.uk/W/P/TwmRR.htm

(look at EFF Tuwim ExtraBold)

Yes, I believe a variant of that face was the one I used for the word "Unofficial" at the top of this page, and it still isn't quite right.

I seem to recall that Hugo rotated the e's in the logo by hand. I have no idea what the font was called - Hugo might remember.

Rob

I know I'm voting twice for the same thing, but I think that the buttons look the best. Reminds me of the Quake logos...

Post to one of the font newsgroups and you are sure to get a suggestion for the best match TTF/Type1/OT font. Then getting your hands on the font can be either 1. tricky or 2. easy. It all "depends"

BTW, rotating the "e" on a large number of faces will produce similar results to the example using Futura. I have a couple of Adobe font books here, but I've never bothered to look for a matching font (Rob sent me the logo eps files a long time ago, so I didn't bother finding a close-match font - and it saved me the trouble of reproducing it myself (easy but time consuming) )

Oh, I also vote for the flat empeg-button design. The other images have too many flaws. The Tux variations are monochromatic, aren't really original art and aren't very representative of the empeg. The shot of the actual unit is pretty much a scaled and rotated image from the stock product shots on the web. Won't make a very nice icon on most platforms. It would probably look pretty nice on Mac OS X though.

The buttons could have a nice J in there somewhere. Styled into the bottom button or incorporated into the background or foreground.

Bruno

Windows 2000 supports 48 pixel icons. So does Me and 98. I'm almost sure that even an upgraded Win95 can use them (can't remember what upgrade, it's been so long... Maybe Plus Pack and/or new IE).

If you really wanted to, you could have something even bigger than 48 (not really a standard icon) in Win2K and XP, but now you're getting into a lot more custom work/code.

I'll say it again... Don't forget to include a 128 pixel version for the Mac binary (along with a 32 pixel and 16 pixel version in the resource for OS 9)

Bruno

BTW, rotating the "e" on a large number of faces will produce similar results to the example using Futura.

Right, exactly. You could rotate the "e" on just about any sans-serif face and get similar results. I know it's not a Futura variant because the "a" in futura is single-story, but the "a" in the empeg-car logo is two-story.

Although it's really good to know that the e was originally straight, that makes searching for the font easier. Haven't tried again since learning that information, I'll play with it some more when I get a chance.

Windows 2000 supports 48 pixel icons. So does Me and 98.

Sure, you can change your icon size to whatever you want in the display properties. That doesn't mean it is going to look good. I meant XP is the first to ship with default 48 icons, so people might actually use that size, since it won't look like crap.

Tom

No, I mean 2000, Me and 98 have 48 pixel icons. I'm not talking about blowing up 32 pixel originals. The exception is that not all the software comes with the larger icons and not all the icon libraries contain the larger ones. This isn't speculation... I used the feature in 98 and I just turned it on in 2000 last night while reading this thread. This showed me that even Winzip comes with 48 pixel icons (and I'm back a couple of versions).

Bruno

Let me know if any of the Adobe (and Adobe-licenced) faces are a close match.

If you're going to be looking in a manual fashion, then a few of the font vendors have online type browsers (Adobe, Letraset, ITC, etc...)

If the Acorn original was a vector format, a ttf or Type1 version should be sitting in someone's catalog.

Bruno

Let me know if any of the Adobe (and Adobe-licenced) faces are a close match.

Wow, I can't find anything that matches it.

I went to a lot of trouble this morning to make an absolutely perfect image for the WhatTheFont page, based on a postscript outline of the original logo. I rotated the E back into place just for the matching algorithm. This is the image I submitted:



(The letters are out of order because I had to break apart the overlaps and rebuild the broken parts in some of the letters. So the letters ended up random in the image, no meaning should be inferred by the accidental word that was spelled here. )

WhatTheFont finds a whole bunch of CLOSE matches, but nothing quite nails it. The "a" in particular is completely wrong in every single match it found.

This is a really tough one to match!

By the way, if you want to try this image in WhatTheFont for yourself, click on this link and make sure to change the "c" to a "c" (the initial letterform pass mistakes it for an "e").

Then it will show you all the matches. You'll see how they're all CLOSE, but not exact. WhatTheFont essentially comes to the same conclusion that our graphic artist and I came to: it's not a common standard font that can be found in your average library.

We should hear from Hugo on this. It's within reason that he modified the letters a little bit. Also, you may want to "un-kern" (kern to the right) the "a" in your sample image. That may help the font algorithm thing.

[edit] Nevermind abot the "a" - I took a look at the link and it seems it was pulled properly. Damn, that's a sweet engine. too bad it wasn't around six years ago.

Bruno

Yes, the WhatTheFont search engine is rather sweet, it gives you a very clear picture on how it's doing the shape recognition.

As you can see, it has no trouble detecting the letterforms and giving close matches. I'm convinced, after seeing how it handled that sample, that there is no font in its database that matches the empeg font.

And by the way. I know that we've diverged here from the main topic of choosing Jemplode icons.

I don't think we need to match the typeface exactly in order to provide a good-looking "J". There are enough style cues in the existing letters that we could build a proper J that comes out looking like it would have in the original font.

But it's still an interesting exercise to try to locate a TTF or Postscript version of the empeg font. I know I would certainly like to do that.

I didn't mod the letters, but they are italicised (maybe 15 degree lean?). Wish I could remember what font it was, but this was on an acorn machine so the font name may well bear little relation to the actual font name... a lot of people converted adobe type 1 fonts, gave them new names & stuck them on acorn BBSes.

Hugo

So it was originally a straight-up font, and the italics are a simple skewing of the letters, rather than a dedicated italic font? That will help narrow down the search, thanks.

Okay, so then...

Rotate the E back to level, de-skew the letters back to vertical, we get this:



So Hugo, is that more or less the font you started with? WhatTheFont still can't find it.

did you notice the "e" in Souvenir Gothic Antique D Demi is written properly for a unrotated "e"?
although that's a serif font, a sans-serif version would look right with out needing to rotoate anything

That's the thing. I keep finding stuff where there's, say, one character that matches exactly, but then the rest don't. Or the font is close, but it's a serif version. Or something like that.

Yea, I noticed that too.. the C is pretty distinctive since it's basicly an o with a wedge cut out of it.. When I searched for just that letter, it only found one that really matched (was the last match too..) and all of the other letters were totally off..

Maybe we should just say E from this font, M from this other font, etc...

I just came across this thread and thought I might add something.



I still prefer the buttons though