An alternate design that comes to mind is the one used for the technical barnstar - and indeed said barnstar would even make sense in context, given design is a very large part of any good technical implementation and these do be wikis.
As for the icons, Pau is right about black being a not good colour for them, but making them solid grey wouldnt necessarily help either - some of the icons are very solid, while others arent, and any solid colour would still make that stand out, contributing to that inconsistency. As it is, the support and testing ones are much more prominent than say the translation, and apparently also bigger to boot, which is only exaggerated by their solidity.
But this is for mwws visual identity, right? MediaWiki, it aint flat, so why would its wikis icons be flat? Nevermind how Wikimedia is going, this is the platform. There is this cheery sunflower and these cute buttons... and then a bunch of large, hard, flat icons. It doesnt fit. Are there perhaps more dynamic sets that could be used? I appreciate these are harder to find and would probably need to be made ourselves to actually fit, since they indeed often tend to be if anything overdone, but it would be worthwhile to consider, at least.
On 01/03/2013 09:22, Quim Gil wrote:
On 03/01/2013 07:56 AM, Heather Walls wrote:
Hi Quim and Pau,
TL;DR, the suggested design icons are men.
Good point, arguably applicable to the icon we are using for "meetings" as well: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Community_Noun_project_2280.svg
For the rest of cases we went for non-antropomorphic icons, and perhaps this is a good guideline to keep to avoide these unwanted side effects.
For what is worth I was proposing a ruler for Design - following a the line of abstraction & simplicity we seem to be following.
http://thenounproject.com/noun/ruler/#icon-No1693
While I know that you have no intention to imply anything in that regard, if I were approaching as a volunteer and a woman it would (maybe only subconsciously) read to me as if things are a bit man-centric.
I would prefer that not be the case.
+1
Regarding the design icon I would prefer something moresimplistic. Since icons seem to be based on the noun project, I took the architect one <http://thenounproject.com/__noun/architect/#icon-No1484 http://thenounproject.com/noun/architect/#icon-No1484> and made this quick adaptation <https://dl.dropbox.com/u/__30377416/design/mw_design___icon_idea.svg https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30377416/design/mw_design_icon_idea.svg> to
make it a bit more MediaWiki specific (and replace #000 with #111). I made a screenshot of the result in the page<https://dl.dropbox.com/u/__30377416/design/mw_design___icon_in_context.png https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30377416/design/mw_design_icon_in_context.png> to
see the icon in context.