Icon Refresh #2330

I've noticed the Mac binary's icon is somewhat poor quality; it is not properly shadowed, resulting in ugly lines around it, and in addition the icon as a whole isn't very graphically pleasing, giving the impression the app is somewhat amateurish. A professionally designed icon would be a lot better, and given many graphics designers, including myself, have contributed and released such icons for use, it seems silly not to swap to one of them away from the pancake design...even the old gold-coin design was significantly better (I understand it was dropped due to small size; larger, vector versions are available now).

I should add, I have personally designer better ones here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98240.msg1368488#msg1368488

But I'm not suggesting mine should be used; if the community wants to it can, i've already released them, but I'd be just as happy for someone else's work to be used, as long as it's decent.

If using from my designs there, these are probably my favourites: or

The gold coin was retired because it was too blingy - creating associations with casinos, video games, "get rich quick schemes" etc. The new one is more stylized, simplified, just showing the virtual coin concept.

Feel free to design a better looking icon, or fix up artifacts, but it should be in the spirit of the new icon not the old one.

just resize the picturebox so it's bigger

Actually, you'd have to resize the icon downwards until the drop-shadow is properly contained, but that rather bypasses the main point, that the icon is poor. It doesn't follow the Apple HIG, nor icon "Style" - icons are supposed to be photorealistic or near to, and have shading and tone, lit from a 15 degree vertical angle; this is neither, and it looks amateurish; on the bitcointalk.org forums there are plenty of discussions showing up the dislike this icon is held within the community; I take on board what laanwj says about the old one being too "blingy", but it needs to represent a coin, but at the same time, it can look less like someone did it in 5 minutes in MS word. It makes the app look cheap and "amateurish". if you don't believe me, take a look at the top 100 apps on the mac AppStore, and show me a single one with an icon like this... The flat pancake looks bad, and the pointless slanting of the Bitcoin sign just annoys people (believe it or not, there was a whole 3-4 pages of thread of people hating just on the slant, and it's pointless "lets make it look cool" approach).... I'm not saying it has to be my design, happy for someone else to step in as well, but I am saying that if you want people to take the Mac Bitcoin client, and really the platform as a whole, more seriously, and not look like some dodgy thing cooked up by amateurs, you need professional-level graphics and artwork, and that icon is neither.

Obviously it doesn't follow the mac interface guidelines. The icon is used on all platforms, we don't have a team of artists at our beck to do design for every platform's specific fashion-of-the-day (MS fanboys want this, Mac fanboys want that, Ubuntu fanboys want thus).

Closing this issue as it is devolving into a battle of opinions.

Reopening this as I agree that we can use a new icon, and the ones in the thread that you link are actually pretty nice.

I sent you a private e-mail about that, but I'll state publicly here, that I am sorry for my poor choice in words; I edited my original comments almost instantly; they do not reflect my thoughts.

Maybe the best thing to do would be to make a post on the Bitcoin forums; "Design a new icon for Bitcoin". Then we can al submit icons, and take a vote on what the community's favourite is. There may surface something we can all agree to, and maybe even a bounty can be put together (i'll contribute a few bitcents...hey, I'm a poor struggling artist LOL!)... With regards your point about the icon needing to be platform neutral, I agree...and disagree. I'll explain. A Mac style icon can (and should) be a restyling of one that is drawn to suit a windows app, likewise a linux one; they can all be the same design, but slightly restyled. For instance, the apple Safari icon; on Mac it is as it should be, but on Windows it should (apple haven't done this, they won't change their icons!) be drawn in a more illustrated style; more pastels, less photoreal etc. And on Linux, if it were drawn for that platform, it would be perhaps more cartoonish, and vivid, a la the "Crystal/Krystal" icon set.

Since the designer has already designed the icon (which is the bulk of the work), and what not, designing a few variants is not a major issue. The icon should be immediately recognisable as Bitcoin, but should look good at high detail (for reference, on Mac, icons now are expected to be 1024x1024...we;re a long way from 32x32, eh?), and should be re-deployable across other platforms in a slightly different style (yet still the same design etc). I would suggest we don't veer far from the "coin" motif, but again, if we make a forum post about this, and make it a polled "competition" or whatever, people are free to do what they like, and the whole community can have a say and input then...obviously this would be an icon only - we're not talking about rebranding Bitcoin itself...just making a better icon for the client app....

The low resolution issue is present on Ubuntu as well, in the launcher to the left of the screen. I wonder if the icon could be included as an .svg as well, because I think common Linux distributions can read that as well.

Certainly wouldn't be an issue; provided the original icon is created in a vector format, ie Illustrator...

I personally generally only draw in vector, although I know some icon designers draw in photoshop/gimp etc. Perhaps if we do go down the forum-call line, then mandate the artwork should be supplied in vector format, and then there won't be any issue with later moves to larger icons etc.

The current icon is in the source tree in svg format ("bitcoin.svg"). I think we should require the same from any replacement icons.

Although vector doesn't completely make the scaling issue go away, especially at the very small sizes (such as 16x16/24x24/32x32 for the notification icon) we still need a bitmap. @schildbach The problem with the launcher icon is separate; to have a high-resolution launcher icon you need to install a .desktop file in the right place, and an icon somewhere in the shared system directories. I'm not sure if the ppa does this, but the problem is not unavailability of the current icon in different sizes.