aros68k icon set proposal (wip)

[hairy]

With all due respect to the creators of that standard, I think magic workbench icons looks like cr... ahem... terrible.

And not just now, even back then. They looked terrific the first day, they were boring after a week.

I think the problem is that when you have limited palette, choosing to ignore half of the color space is always a bad idea: a few gradients might look better, but all the missing hues will be noticeable as soon as you need to represent something that absolutely needs to be at least in the same slice of the hue wheel.

So in the end, in my humble opinion is always better to use a palette spreading all the color space (e.g. 16 color RGBI), even at the cost of more grainy dithering.

I remember that, back at the times, I found ProLite set to be particularly pleasant and consistent, even if a little "cartoonish".

All that using only 8 colors, the basic system 4, plus the standard extended 4 (non-pure red, yellow, green and blue). There was also an alternate set made to look ok on 1280x512.

The cons is that they need newicons, IIRC.

[hairy]

Yes, that's the one! Try it if you have the chance.

That 8 colour palette also works reasonably well for dithered (non-remapped) backdrops, since the yellow is a bit orange-ish, and you already have cyan-of-sorts as the 4th base color.

One of the factors contributing to the tidy look is standardized height.
Variable size sure is a plus, but better reserve it for huge game icons only :lol:

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Well, another random thought/reminescence occurred to me:
about the same point back in time, I tried extensively HAM workbench modes, both 6bit and 8bit.

Now, the visual result were already excellent at HAM6 (on AGA obviously).
By using the 16 fixed base colors, you can have 4+4 system colors, add 4 MWB colors, and still have another 4 free (which I used to enhance MUI widgets, magicmenu, etc.). And avoid using 8 planes, which is the main point, I guess!

But the little detail that made all concept to collapse, was that the system insisted in picking the last four (the "extended" 4 system colours) from the end of the WHOLE 64c palette, which gave rise to that "nice" green stripes on some of the OS elements. :mad:

I never understood why nobody tackled the problem, it looks to me a matter of a simple patch? (at least, maybe simple to someone skilled with system and patches programming = not me :laugh1:).