I've been working on some Workbench icons. I'm using 3.1 so I can have 8 and 16 color icons, perhaps more - can you imagine?
Because color 0 & 1 is hardcoded to BG and text and it's useful to keep few colors variable for OS styling, I decided to use only 12 static colors for icons and leave the first 4 for a 3.1 or 1.3 scheme or one of my own.
Installing icons is a bit of a pain. There are helper programs (PD) but none of them do quite what need them to, and some don't work due to dependencies and bloat. I'll probably have to finish the file scanner that I started working on.
Icons are stored in separate *.info files where * is the name of the file, e.g. Banana.IFF. The image is stored in bitplanes, 4 in the case of 16 colors. They have 2 frames and can be any size, but keeping the width at or below a multiple of 16 is a good idea because (afaik) the bitplanes are stored in 16-bit/pixel format. A 33px wide icon would waste 15 bits per bitplane * height * 2 frames or so, and would probably draw/blit slower. The .info files also store what-happens-when-I'm-clicked arguments, position in window, etc.
Unfortunately there's no alpha mask, and in 2.0+ the icons have boxes around them. It can be patched though. Setting the 8+ colors is a bit of a pain too I guess (need visualprefs or something). It would've been neat if the icons stored their palette color values and not just pixel data so they could be adapted to foreign palettes, but icons are loaded off floppy often and can lag the system if they have too much data.
I'm blarging. Hmm. About the design of these, I did put some thought into some. Icons are tricky because sometimes you need to illustrate a very strange concept, like "Any file printed goes into a file instead". I just put a printer cable cord onto a floppy for that one.
Library files: I turned this into a book with a brain-tree on it (knowledge tree, and books are made out of wood).
Datatype: Used by programs to recognize new file formats, so Tron recognizer.
Iff file: Combined the DP pyramid with the default iff landscape icon, and random volcano of presumably paint.
Folder: I like the 1.3 look with the white drawers, but folders are nice to so I made an weird Drawlder.
Say: Removed in later WBs but any sound Amigian would copy it over from 1.3 and make it say WUBDUBWUBkRAAkRAAkRAAboobibibbiwowo. I wnated to antho up my WB and here I chose to use the Z head and Maria. Z always felt like it could've been an Amiga game had C= not messed up.
Commodities: turned into robo-creatures for no reason other than antho theme.
Binary/Data files: Used punchcards as reference for these.
Preferences: Took a cue from the lovely System 7 (mac) with the sliders, and combined with a WB style "?". Some of these use the first 4 colors as I'm showing how the editor windows look. Did the same with the calculator.
Tool: Turned it into a cog (was hammer). Used as default icon for programs without icons.
Pixel-technically, I tried to keep AA and dither at a minimum and avoided perspectives resulting in angles. The colors are bitplane collapsible so the icons would look okay in 4 color mode, and this limited which colors I could chose, but not too much. I'm using primaries and a gray ramp ending in warm with option for cool sky blue mid-shade. I did these in 8 colors first and expanded to 12 later so I'm not always uing the palette to its fullest on the older icons.
That's it for now. Toot~toot~
