Today, I was playing with the idea of redoing the base sheet used in all Oxygen mimetypes. It is infact getting a bit old, and also Nuno thought that it might use a little redesign.

I was feeling particularly inspired this morning, so I fired up inkscape and tried to mess around with the gradients, in order to create a new revision of the sheet. I knew that it wasn’t going to be a full redesign, since we don’t want a completely new design that breaks consistency, but simply a reshape of the colors and gradients to make it look more modern.

I concentrated mostly on the 32×32 size, since it’s the one that is the most commonly used, and I think I got pretty good results there. I’m also quite satisfied of the other sizes: i might still play a bit with the contrast of the 16×16 icon (the smallest) but I think I’m there.

This is what I came up with: (the new set is the one on the right)

So, what do you think?

EDIT: Ah, something I forgot… I was also thinking of putting the folded corner on the top-right, instead of bottom-right as it is now. Opinions?

Yes, the new planet went live finally today, with a new fresh look which takes it out from the last nineties and brings it down directly to the modern times.

The design has started at akademy, on wade’s commission, and then got several rounds of refining and polishing, last of which been done by nuno who was trying to accomodate the usual bikeshed that developers’ taste brings up.¹ ;-)

We still have to work some more on it, pixel perfectionness is the first thing that comes to my mind, then some more fluidity in the layout (thanks to felipe who told me is working on a patch for it), and, most important of all, someone that knows about CSS and HTML that can give a hand. Jonathan has done a terrific work, but, as he says, that’s the best that his web skills permits him. :-)

Then we need to refine all those little things like alignments, shadows, and so on…

Anyways, already a great improvement, no? ;-)

Enjoy the new planet!

- Your beloved Roophie

¹ no offence meant, we already cleared that up, just… history!