App icon suggestions #2
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I can help with ideas and also designing an icon, if you wish... |
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A name change to a more international one would need to be somehow related to the current name, I don't think a full re-brand is worth the effort. If you have a really good idea, I might consider it, but probably won't happen anytime soon. I see that the name might look hard to pronounce, but I don't think it actually is hard to pronounce if you know how to. For the same pronunciation in English, you might write something like "Shilldy-Chat", I guess. "Too long" - well, it's three syllables, so same as "Element", but way easier to search for in the Internet. I don't see the need to make it any shorter, while risking being less searchable. We're open to a better version of the icon, if it maintains the original traits. |
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What does the app stand for? What are its main traits? What is it trying to be? I need to know this in order to come up with some suggestions. Also, are you ok with dropping the "chat" word from the app name? None of the mainstream (or popular) chatting apps do that (Element, Riot, Signal, Telegram, etc..). |
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"Schildi" comes from "Schildkröte", which is turtle in German. We don't have any "mission" or philosophical "what the app stands for", we just develop a chat client that we want to use for ourselves, and share it with the community. Accordingly, you might have noticed it's not a priority for us to have a "professional" name, or how you call it. "chat" is not required, but it is good if the app name says something about what the app does. If you want an explanation of what the logo stands for, here is some that I came up with (as a joke) after everything was designed already:
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Turchat (Turtle + chat) The logo could look something like this:
this is just a rough draft |
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Thanks for your input. I'm not persuaded though, I still prefer the old icon and name. |
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Just installed the app and I like it very much! First thing I thaught, this logo is a little off. |
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@HerrFrutti The only thing that bothers me right now is that the shape of the post horn reminds me slightly too much of the "Deutsche Post" logo - maybe one with a little less bending would do, similar to this one? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Berlin._Spandau._Citadel_057.JPG/1280px-Berlin._Spandau._Citadel_057.JPG Do you have experience with designing icons and/or vector graphics? |
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Yeah I taught of Deutsche Post when reading Posthorn :D I'll talk to her and update you on a more developed version of my sketch. |
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Hi. The current logo doesn't really bother me. That being said, if a new one is looked at, I would recommend to use something more "universal" than the horn, on the turtle back. |
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Great! Thanks guys for your understanding! I hope we're being understood, we love your app but we can't recommend it to our friends because it gives a first impression of being: weird, childish and with a hard to pronounce name. But when you get past this hurdle you discover a very great app! It'd be amazing if you changed the name to something more easy to pronounce for as many people from different countries as possible! Honestly, thank you deeply for your understanding! |
I'm open for suggestions |
Maybe a lockpad which symbolizes security and privacy. |
Then we would have no indicator of the messenger aspect. |
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Yeah, I'm not having that much time right now, but I was working on an updated logo. I was thinking of a big shield, that has a divided logo on it. One site is the turtle and on the other the horn. |
Hi EDIT: to make sure my idea is clear, it is to put onto the turtle shell sketch proposed by HerrFrutti |
That looks like WAY too much detail for an icon. |
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On the back of the turtle we could have something that symbolises "Chat" like: 1:
2: 3:
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just another quick sketch: |
Doesn't really persuade me, and also seems like too much detail. These could be icons on their own, but if you put it into another icon, it just gets too small to tell what it is. Keep in mind that an app icon is just a small icon on the screen in many scenarios. Furthermore, 1. takes too much thinking what this actually is, and (2. and) 3. would be kind of copying other apps, and also kind of boring, compared to the horn, if you ask me.
Hm, doesn't persuade me. Your first sketch looked perfect to me, not sure if you're doing new sketches because I said I'm "open for suggestions" for other things to put on the turtles back than a posthorn, or just to have more alternatives to choose from. |
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good to know, if I find the time, I'll look deeper into my first sketch. I just tried different things because my first idea feels complicated to get right. As you said, an icon is small and to much detail is bad. Combining three objects may be too much. But I think we should give it a try and any one can be inspired by the first sketch. |
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Hi |
Still looks like a post horn, I thought you wanted to put something else there 🤔 |
Yes, I did. Then, I noticed it was important for you to echo the deutsche post logo and why not. So, I came with a more modern look. Actually, in many cultures, a horn has been used to make announcements. So, it might mean more than I thought, even for people leaving outside Germany. |
andrew712-1
changed the title
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Hey, if've just played around with a frew Sketches: I was thinking to include the horn inside the turtles back, but I'm not sure about that. let me know your stands :) Here the svg file: |
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Too much detail. |
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But the overall placement of the objects cool, or are there any suggestions ? |
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I agree. until reading this thread I thought the icon was supposed to depict a turtle with a severed head. |
Absolutely no. It doesn't resemble a turtle in any way and the color is horrible. Also far too generic.
I want it. It's a homage to message delivery of older times. It just needs to be in. Point.
Absolutely not. It has to fit @SpiritCroc and me in the first place. |
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no post horn, because that doesn't lend itself to good iconography. happy to supply the svg so you can tweak colors etc. |
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Late last night in Schildichat itself I suggested the above logo concept — the shell as seen from above, with a speech balloon nib. One thing I like about it is the concept easily adapts to different variations. You can easily have a mono-color icon, or full color, or two color , or whatever. It's distinct but simple enough to be easily recognized at small sizes. (Not digging the yellow in @williamkray 's mockup, but otherwise very close to what I was thinking.) For the record, I actively dislike the "horn sticking out of a turtle shell" icon concept. It looks like a weird decapitated turtle. Until finding this discussion I had no idea that what that was supposed to be — I just thought what the heck is up with the turtle's head? |
I also like this one. An iconic form of a turtle, very recognizable as the animal (head, limbs, and tail sticking out of the shell). I like it for similar reasons to my own idea as described above |
Also, in the current icon you're clearly looking at the poor decapitated turtle's butt. ;-) |
Well yes, but no: the butt is actually hidden in the shell (and the head is not decapitated, but just hidden behind the shell). :P So, regarding the speech bubble with turtle shell texture, that's somewhat too generic to me, it lacks something special in my opinion to make it stand out. |
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There are too many simultaneous concepts for a good icon. The turtle works. The horn works. The turtle AND the horn is too crowded, and too disconnected, for a good clean icon. You need too much detail to see what the two things are. It's confusing. Think of famous brand icons — especially as adapted for phones and such. Apple. Target. Windows. Twitter. Reddit. Facebook. McDonalds. Android. All are a single concept, very clean and straightforward. My suggestion is do the turtle or do the horn. Either can work, but pick one. |
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If the art is simple enough for an icon, I can't see how you can show the horn sticking out of the shell with enough detail that people will specifically recognize it as a horn.
Now that you've told me, I can see that it's a horn sticking out of the shell. But without being told, it looks like the turtle has a weird misshapen head. If you have to explain the logo just to know what it is, it's a poor logo. So if you really must have the two concepts, well... I don't know. Two disjoined concepts have to be instantly and simultaneously recognizable for what they are. That's very difficult because a turtle shell and a horn are not connected at all in people's minds. You either end up with a deformed turtle or a misshapen horn. |
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One more concept from me: the recognizable turtle shell pattern — the somewhat hexagon shapes — on a field. On of the hexagons is replaced with a full curled horn. This won't work well at small sizes though. A simplified version for small sizes would be just the horn...? (Also — su ex dismissed the "element turtle" variant in part because he didn't like the color. That's the easiest part of that icon to change. Make it a more turtle-y green and it will really pop, IMO.) |
I see your point, and I personally can imagine myself being fine with only having a turtle and no posthorn. But still ideally I'd like to have some other element related to messaging, such that the icon is not too arbitrary. And su-ex must be happy with the logo as well, so if that includes a post horn, then it must be. While big business logos can be simple, and will be recognizable anyway since the company is big, a little bit more detail doesn't hurt a small project such as us to differentiate. There are many logos out there that resemble Windows and Apple Logos, for example. Also, firefox managed to combine two elements fine in a logo in my opinion, so it's not impossible.
Obviously, but this is not the only thing we don't like about this icon (or at least, that does not make us like it more than our current icon). |
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I mean, if anybody can make #2 (comment) work, I'd be interested, that's still the proposal I (and I think su-ex as well) like the most from here. But unfortunately it may be a bit tricky to keep recognizable at low resolution, and also to make the aspect ratio more square while still having it look nice. |
At small sizes, the Firefox logo is basically just the fox. The world kind of disappears. Hmm... How about this: a turtle in profile. Rather than its shell being a normal shell pattern, it has the horn on it. Or you could do the turtle from above, but that might muddly the concept quite a lot, as from above its the pattern that makes it most recognizable as a turtle. At smaller resolutions, you might have the distinctive turtle and lose the horn |
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another draft |
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That looks pretty cool! I wonder if one could make it work as icon somehow, or if too many details would get lost 🤔 |
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Hi everyone!
Here you can download SVG files for testing: |
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Hm, looks ok-ish to me, but I'd need to try out for a while to be sure. I think for me personally, the post horn is a bit too prominent in this one, but the shell-formed message bubble sounds like a nice idea to me. |
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@SpiritCroc I guess we can scale the horn down a bit in full-size icon:
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I didn't mean the scale, but conceptually having it the thing that you recognize first in the icon. Personally I would prefer having more stress on the turtle rather than the horn in some way. |
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Well, we can certainly put something like a silhouette of a sea turtle instead of horn here. But since the horn was requested by @su-ex this is the only way I found to crossbreed it with a turtle without going too bizarre :) - one of them should be abstract, and in this case it's a turtle in form of a bubble with a tail. |
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Yeah, probably hard to hit the sweet spot where it is not too prominent for me but prominent enough for su-ex... Maybe next time I play around with icons I can try out your icon anyway to see how it looks/feels in practice, but I probably won't get to it soon |
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Here's how it could look like. The turtle shape starts to loose clarity on smaller sizes, while the horn still works fine.
Yep, no problem. As an average user I'll hope for the best tho :) |
Hm yeah, was better before, now also looks a bit like some zoo app on first glance.
Thank you :) |
this is a fantastic drawing. i think it’s quite strong as a concept because it does somehow manage to incorporate the many elements the lead devs seem to want in the icon relatively compactly and is simultaneously both cute and unique. one can finally tell it’s a turtle and a horn. it reminds me a lot of the skeuomorphic app logos old macintosh applications used to have and i think that’s a good thing. is there any way you can render this in your previous iconographic style? @franksouza183 |
Of course, when my mind takes a break from coding I can render this artwork. That's why I made a sketch and not a direct render, it was a brief moment of inspiration, so I grabbed my pen and scribbled quickly before it went away xD. Soon I'll be working in design again, so I can take care of it, hopefully it won't be too late. Anyway, if anyone wants to get a head start on this, feel free to try. |
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There are plenty of options now. Everybody should find something. I just changed the logo in ThemePark, but the launch screen shows the ugly old logo after opening the app for one sec. I think its hardcoded there. We need a option to disable the logo there. |
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@SpiritCroc Any further consideration for an app icon change? Or still |
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You may have seen the icon we've been using for schildichat-android-next. Maybe we'll keep that, we'll see. |
I see! I do prefer that one over the current icon. I think the shading presents a potential issue with scaling as seen here, although I don't see anyone complaining about the shading in the icons: People on this issue comment section seem to be suggesting their own icons / sketches for icons, so I guess I'll do that too. This is just a sketch, not a final vector, obviously. I tried to make it geometric and have an easily identifiable silhouette, even at lower resolutions. |
SpiritCroc's edit:
People seem to be unhappy with the icon (not all, but a considerable amount).
Issues seem to be:
So, while we, the SchildiChat team, are happy with the icon, we're open for contributions if you have any.
Note that if you want your suggestion to be taken seriously, you need to be grant us all rights for your design (re-destribution, modifications etc. without having to ask you), and we need a vector graphics / svg, so we can properly work with it.
Make sure to also read below discussion for previous suggestions, so you know what aspects are important to us.
Original message by andrew712-1
EDIT: Let this issue be about the logo only and this new issue to be about the app name #3
Please change the icon, the current one is too childish.
Please change the name of the app, it's too long, and hard to pronounce especially for russians. We need a shorter and easier to pronounce (internationally) name.
I love your app, but I can't recommend it to anyone because of these two issues...
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