Overhaul of the Assets #3269
Overhaul of the Assets #3269
Conversation
liamrosenfeld
changed the title
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Hi Liam, I made the current icons and I'd like to thank you for stepping up and making some new icon proposals. Are you capable of making some screenshots on how the new icons look like in the dock (macOS) or on Windows? I'm interested is checking that out. As for the move away from shadows and gradients, do you know of some reading material online to back this up? |
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Also please sign the CLA |
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This design seems to me not so much moving forward to follow the website and app's design as moving back to MuseScore 1. Black on a white background has been done. Why not white on blue, like on the new website? |
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@IsaacWeiss: not sure where you see black on white, I see blue on white in this PR, change from blue on beige |
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Looked black to me on a dim screen. ;-) Still, this is then very like the discarded icon from 2.0b1. |
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@thomasbonte, Here is some material about the trend towards flat design: I am currently compiling my fork of musescore, and I'll have screenshots as soon as possible. |
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@thomasbonte Weren't the current square and round icons deliberately crafted to fit in with the flat(ter) designs of, respectively, Windows 8 and Mac OS X Yosemite, neither of which has since become flatter? |
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@IsaacWeiss, The current round and square icons seem to currently fit best with |
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When I compiled my fork the logo stayed the same, is the assets folder icon the correct icon to change? |
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Which OS do you compile on ? |
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Oh, thank you. I see where it is now. |
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@thomasbonte, I compiled my fork and here are some screenshots: Just let me know if you would like any other screenshots. |
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Definitely Yosemite, not Mavericks. See in context with other icons, particularly those of App Store, iTunes, iBooks, and Safari: https://simplyrobert.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/musescore-2-0-beta/musescore-launchpad/ |
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@IsaacWeiss Sorry, my bad. But the real point of this Updated Logo isn't to match a single operating system, it's to match the rest of the musescore ecosystem. |
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@IsaacWeiss, using your feedback I created this new icon. @thomasbonte, do you prefer this one to the white background? |
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@liamrosenfeld: I <3 this design. Logo should probably be bolder to work at small sizes. |
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@IsaacWeiss, thank you! I'll compile it and then tweak it from there. |
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👍 I appreciate the slight gradient in the background, too! |
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I like where this is going. But give me another week to come to this as I'm
fully occupied with the musescore.org site upgrade. Meanwhile keep the
conversation going.
Ps the last iteration reminded me somehow of the iTunes logo, at least the
blue gradient I think. Not sure as I write this only from memory.
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Now that I look at them side by side, I do notice the apple-esque design of the blue logo. It appears to share a feel with the App Store Icon and Readdle's Spark Icon, where I now noticed Readdle exactly copied the App Store gradient. The gradient in the blue icon I built from the colors on musescore.com, so it has differences in the color, intensity, blending, and direction of the gradient. Just let me know if this would be a reason to not use this version of the Icon and I'll start brainstorming a new one. |
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I thought the blue gradient was perfect. A little surprised that you seem to say you "noticed" the round one you made had an Apple-esque design, though. It looked to me like you had deliberately adhered to Apple's icon design guidelines. |
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@IsaacWeiss, I have developed a few apps for iOS. The slightly rounded but flat design has just become my default. The color similarities are what I was mainly referring to. Sorry that I was unclear. |
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I compiled the blue logo: Just let me know if you would like any other screenshots. |
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@IsaacWeiss, the one I committed is bolder than the one I originally linked. |
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@liamrosenfeld I still would like it to be equally thick as in the current one... |
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@IsaacWeiss, the current icon appears to have a weight of 10px. The current icon committed has a weight of 7px. The round icon still looks nice with a weight of 10px, but it departs from the thinner design of the full-text logo on musescore.org. Do you think this is a fair tradeoff? Edit: Here is a gif comparing the current committed logo and the equally thick one. |
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@liamrosenfeld, I feel I should make clear that I don't have any particular authority on these matters, and my opinion doesn't carry any more weight than that of any other contributor. I'm also very impressed with your apparent skill with digital design. That said, I do prefer the thicker version. The MuseScore 2 icon is equally thicker than the full-text logo on the previous version of the website. (Actually, @thomasbonte, perhaps the website logo could stand a little more weight, too?) Also, it's worth mentioning that, while the enclosing gray ring is perfectly nice and doesn't bother me, it's not quite the same as the Apple-standard one that is evident in the App Store icon, for example.
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Ok the summary/guide is nearly finished. I should have it done later today. |
That means we can pretty much rely on their information to be true, but not necessarily the whole truth (i.e. it may still be biased). They wrote the licence because they want people to use it, so they have little incentive to mention its potential downsides. |
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@shoogle, if you have time, could you pick one of the splash screen options to add? That might help this PR recover from the recent stall. |
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I can put current splash screen SVG to the repo if it helps. Also, I would be really happy to remove all binary assets and generate them on fly. But I still don't understand how to use the changes from this PR. |
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@anatoly-os, my understanding is that it uses automation to save the icons to transfer.sh and then on OSs that support downloads mid build it downloads them to the desired location, and then for OSs that can't download it uses ImageMagick to generate them and then moves them to the desired locations. Currently, the only thing left to get this PR building is the part of the build script that moves the splash screen to the desired location. @shoogle would know the details. |
Co-Authored-By: Peter Jonas <[email protected]>
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I just pushed some more commits including the updated README files. @liamrosenfeld, please don't squash these; let me do it otherwise I have to rebase twice (once against the main repo and again against yours). It's best if you don't push any more commits until this is merged, but feel free to suggest a replacement font for Roboto. Anything on Google Fonts that uses the Open Font License is suitable (licenses are displayed on the bottom right of the font page). |
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@anatoly-os, I don't recommend merging this just yet as there are some things we need to discuss first, but the code won't change very much so feel free to take a peak. The structure is easiest to browse on my branch. The README files explain how everything works, but it is rather a lot of information. The point is that the assets build has been completely modularized, so it is totally independent of MuseScore's build. The assets build could even be put in a separate repository and it would work just fine. The only thing that MuseScore developers have to understand is the manifest file, which lists the files generated during the assets build. You can make use of those file in MuseScore's CMakeLists.txt files like this. You can download the latest copy of the generated assets here: https://transfer.sh/QCx9R/MuseScore-assets-3.0.1.zip |
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@shoogle, Tantacrul recently made a YouTube video offering lots of constructive criticism about the design of Musescore. This PR seems like a natural place to implement some of his glyph and logo recommendations if you all want to. |
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@liamrosenfeld, this PR already makes the logo changes he suggests (and did so before he suggested them). I wouldn't make changes to glyphs (i.e. in-app icons for buttons in toolbars, etc.) in this PR because that will just make it take longer to get merged. On the subject of glyphs, I think the real lesson from Tantacrul's video is that these need to be done by a professional or taken from an existing open source set. He even identifies some existing sets that he thinks are suitable, so perhaps we should check them to see if they include all the musical icons we need. If not then we should offer to contribute musical icons to the open source set to ensure consistency. Anyway, let's not discuss this here. If you want to work on glyphs then please start a thread on the MuseScore forum and post a link to it here so we can find it. |
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@shoogle, sounds good. Do we have a final plan to prepare for merge? |
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@liamrosenfeld @shoogle If you guys need a designer, perhaps I could help? I'm currently studying graphic design and I'm also an avid user of Musescore |
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@IkeBoiiii, thanks. This PR is implements some new design but it is mainly structural (i.e. it does some fancy new things in code and we are more interested in getting the code working than the design, which can wait until later). However, there are separate design discussions going on elsewhere. MuseScore's design was recently reviewed by a YouTuber, and we have a list of points raised here. If you want to work on any of those things then follow these steps to get started, or simply introduce yourself in MuseScore's Telegram chat channel. |
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@shoogle, as we near the second year mark, do we have a final plan to prepare for merge? |
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@liamrosenfeld, the MuseScore team has created new icons designs since this PR was submitted, some of them based on ideas you suggested, so it may be that this PR as a whole is not needed any more. I suspect the complexity of the icon generation code hindered, rather than helped, the effort to get this PR merged. However, the effort was not wasted. I will put the icon generation code in a separate repository where it will serve as an example for other projects wishing to generate icons in CMake. Maybe the code will even be used to generate MuseScore's icons, albeit not as part of MuseScore's build process? If they give me the icon source file then I can generate all the different formats and sizes in 5 seconds, and these can just be checked into MuseScore's repository as usual - no need for anybody to understand the code used to generate them (except me of course!). Anyway, there are some parts of this PR that are probably still welcome in MuseScore, such as the new document icons for MSCX/MSCZ and MusicXML files. I will leave those bits in when I remove the icon generation code. |
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@shoogle, sounds good. Thank you for all of the work you put into this over the last two years! |
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@liamrosenfeld, you're welcome! It was actually very useful for me personally, as it has given me an excellent understanding of:
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Peter Jonas dixit:
Maybe the code will even be used to generate MuseScore's icons, albeit
not as part of MuseScore's build process? If they give me the icon
source file then I can generate all the different formats and sizes in
5 seconds, and these can just be checked into MuseScore's repository
as usual - no need for anybody to understand the code used to generate
them (except me of course!).
From a packager’s PoV, if this is ever used, it should be in the
repository, and enablable for packagers, since we tend to rebuild
everything that can be rebuilt in Debian, or at least leave that
option open for the case in which we HAVE to do it for various
reasons.
I can’t see very compelling ones for non-code, other than trademark
claims, so I’d probably also accept if just the icon source file is
also in the main repo and the sizes are just copied in, but merging
this whole thing would be better.
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I'll retrieve some of the design improvements we made through this pull request and open up new (smaller) ones using the current image system. |
Design is moving away from shadows and yellow gradients to create texture. The musescore website and the musecore songbook app already reflect that. Currently, the desktop icon is still stuck behind the times, here are more modern rounded and square icons.