Add-on icons: an attempt to unify (addon and skin developers please read)

Hello everybody,

One thing that has been bugging me, and I guess several other skinners, regarding skin development is the wide variety of icons used in scripts and plugins. Because of the big variety in sizes and shapes it's hard to create layouts that have a consistent look without squashed or ugly upscaled icons.

With the upcoming new add-ons system in XBMC I think this is the perfect time to do something about that. But it will require some guidelines to be set, and I am hoping skinners and plugin/script/scraper/addon developers will partake in this process.
I feel this could ultimately result in a much nicer and consistent presentation of add-ons within xbmc.

To illustrate take a look at the screenshot from Boxee below.


Now it's not about if you like the boxee skin or layout used here, but one thing you can notice is that it does look consistent because of the clear logo's used that all have the same size.

And to compare add-ons in XBMC:

(Please ignore the multiple movie trailers icons, that's me just using placeholders)

The amount of add-ons available is limited right now. Once this amount will increase I'm sure the amount of diffent variations would only grow.
(Take a look in the scraper categories in the Addon browser for instance)

So I'm hoping we can discuss and come to some sort of consensus about this.
I will start by listing what I think would be a good list of characteristics and give a motivation:

square shape
motivation:
-it is the most space efficient
-I think it's the optimal shape when used in varying viewtypes
-it's common to "appstore" like ecosystems

logo centric
motivation:
-I feel it will provide the best quick identification by the user
-there are great sites around providing excellent HQ logo's for known sources like brandsoftheworld.com and wikimedia.

name incorporated into the icon
motivation:
-It will provide quick identification regardless of the type of view being used (a skinner could choose to have the viewtype in an icon based layout without labels and the icon will still provide the name of the add-on

no borders (shadows, lines, etc)
motivation:
-skinners can apply the styling used throughout their skin, once again contributing to consistency. This is actually how this is handled in the appstore for iPhone, iPad, iProducts. Apps provide a clean logo, and the "skin" will overlay the shadow/glossy layer so that it gets that unified look. And I'm hardly an Apple fan

no transparency or gloss
motivation: same reason as above.

Now, this all is how I feel about it. I hope we can come together and get more opinions or ideas.

Oh, and I'm sure there could be a community effort in helping the addon creators getting nice logos

Thanks for reading
Jeroen

While I think its a nice idea the boxee example really is just transparent logos of all sizes put onto a square background easy to do auto with xbmc view containers and make them all the same size looking

I personally think a 16x9 icon is a better idea myself because screenshots for skins are nice and most are 16x9 these days. And I'd can't be screwed making a logo for every skin Ive ever done . Also logos for things do tend to be wider than they are tall mostly because its text.

while i like the idea, it's gonna be hard to enforce. remember, schmucks like me add add-ons and photoshop/gimp have nightmares every night after i have been visiting.

indeed coders don't equal very good artists most just screen cap or save a logo from the the place its for

Well, that's not something that couldn't be solved by a community effort and would actually be a secondary goal of my proposal.
In the spirit of for example the studio and tv show logo threads, add-on developers could request the community to make a nice logo for their add-ons. I'm sure lots of people would be willing to offer their help on that

Jezz_X Wrote:While I think its a nice idea the boxee example really is just transparent logos of all sizes put onto a square background

I know, but then they clearly have a guideline to either use a icon that fits within the set dimensions or use a logo with a fully transparent background so that a fallback texture set by the skin is used. I'd prefer not to use fallback textures to encourage the use of a wide variety of colors. Boxee's method isn't perfect, so we should do it better

Good point about the skin screenshots, although those will be in the minority eventually I suspect. But 16*9 sounds good to me too.

spiff Wrote:it's gonna be hard to enforce

Yes maybe, but you have to start somewhere right? If a defacto standard would come out of this and addon devs and skinners/graphic artists work together I think it has a shot

How about more than one? one 4x3 and one 16x9? then skinners could choose between the 2 and create more layouts?

Transparent sounds like the best option on any size though then the skinner could make as Jezz_X say better looking and consistent backgrounds to the logos.

topfs2 Wrote:How about more than one? one 4x3 and one 16x9? then skinners could choose between the 2 and create more layouts?

Hm, maybe the 4:3 could be ListItem.Icon and the 16:9 the ListItem.Thumb?

Quote:Transparent sounds like the best option on any size though then the skinner could make as Jezz_X say better looking and consistent backgrounds to the logos.

I feel it would end up pretty bland in that case. Besides colors also play a part in the identification. For example LastFM: red, revision3: green, etc.

Another problem you would encounter is the varying colors used in skins. Confluence for example is a dark theme. A logo with dark text and transparent background would be hard to read. In Alaska: an icon with white text and transparent background would be hard to read. A LastFM logo with a red background and white text for example would have good readability in both.

If it's a case of the coder not being comfortable working with Photoshop, there are plenty of artist out there, myself included, willing to step in and help out.

I think Jeroen is on to something here. While I'm all for customization and providng the contributor the freedom to do what they will, we still need to have some rules / guidelines to follow; otherwise we end up with a mess, ie: this very topic here. It's the same at TheTVDb and the like - anyone is free to contributed provided they've followed the guidelines.

Starting now, when there isn't a huge amount of addons, the list of needed images should be pretty easily knocked out.

Jeroen Wrote:Hm, maybe the 4:3 could be ListItem.Icon and the 16:9 the ListItem.Thumb?........

My problem with this is the more we get the more we have to download not everyone in the world has super fast internet and unlimited downloads

Even as it currently is, going into movie scrapers can take 30seconds to get all the icons for me and thats current just icons. If we start adding in 2 different icons and fanart we are looking at getting close to 1mb per addon just for the images (2 icons at 150k each and a 700k fanart) so thats like 34mb to download already just to get a list of items.

Personally if it was up to me I would get rid of fanart and force every one to have 1 icon under 150k (but its not).

We don't need anymore icons

Fair enough, personally having one type of icon would be just fine to me, it was more in response to topfs2's proposal.

Actually I didn't even know you can have fanart in the addons. Can't really see the necessity for it either. I think it would have been a better choice to add fanart capability for addons in the skinning engine, but only allow locally stored images. Anyway, that's a different subject