hey folks, quick update to say you’ve probably noticed our new community icons.
these icons were lovingly crafted by @[email protected], who posted them a couple of days ago over in Creative. we took notice of them and obviously–because they’re our community icons now–really, really liked them.
thanks to his generosity in working things out with us, we’re pleased to announce we can use his icons under a Creative Commons license for the site! until further notice they’ll be our site icons, with credit to him on our sidebars. we’ll also be adding attribution to the community sidebars over the rest of day as time permits.
we’re also pleased to report that, thanks to your generosity, we’ve been able to reasonably compensate him for all 33 of the icons he’s made for the community! the agreed to rate is $5 per icon, for a total of $165 that’s been paid out to him as of today. this expense has been reflected on our Open Collective. (we’ve also agreed to, as possible, commission him for any future community icons until further notice, which will be subject to that same rate.)
hopefully you enjoy the new icons, and please thank UrLogicFails for the work here! thanks for using the site again folks!
on this specific point (we’re tackling the other, will report back on that one later–the previous icon for that community was one i didn’t make so even if i wanted to i literally couldn’t speak on it like i can with most of our previous ones lol):
aesthetics are not really a big consideration for us in general, because we’re very much in function over form mode right now.
but, when the subject needs to be broached, we want to do that right. in this case we have to account for a lot of things with aesthetics here, including but not limited to:
all this to say: there’s really just not much wiggle room we have with the icons and their colors given those considerations, and there are other factors i’m no doubt failing to mention too. our previous icons were dichromatic black on white and very utilitarian/minimalist for a reason, and likewise these are pretty minimalist too.
there’s also the consideration we’d now be asking someone to rip up all their work and basically start over, which we’re pretty hesitant to do–not only because we’ve already paid them, but because the simple reality is we can’t please everyone and i have no doubts we’d get similar critiques with more new icons and/or introduce new problems. at some point we just have to go with something and iterate on it, and as far as i’m concerned these kinds of critiques of the icons i can live with.