All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Topic Images on use Perl;

pudge on 2002-07-09T15:14:20

The topic images on use Perl; mostly really suck. Please make me new ones. Be mindful of the size, and make them transparent where appropriate. I suppose PNG is probably OK (anyone, please tell me if their browsers don't do PNG well these days), and GIF and JPEG are acceptable as well.

I reserve the right to reject your topic images, and maybe we'll have votes (ha!) for competing images. Some of the images are OK in my opinion, like Python, Tcl, The Conway Channel ... it's pretty obvious which ones don't need replacing in many cases. The ones that have a camel because we couldn't come up with anything else pretty much all need replacing.

So help me, those who are graphically inclined. I suck at this sort of thing, and we could really use improved topic images here.

Could we see a sample?

Fletch on 2002-07-09T15:38:45

Maybe throw together an index page with the good and the bad so noted? Give people an idea what you're looking for.

Re:Could we see a sample?

pudge on 2002-07-10T04:08:22

I put in a link to the topics  ... if you can't tell which are good and which are bad, maybe you shouldn't try coming up with new ones.  ;-)

Votes?

Purdy on 2002-07-09T16:08:16

But that would mean updating the Poll  ... and we can't do that!  ;)

Jason

I Turn Them Off Anyway

mako132 on 2002-07-09T18:01:46

I don't feel the images are all that useful anyway. I turned them off on day 1.

If the images were updated on a frequent basis (like every day  :), then I might find them entertaining and leave them on.

But if you consider them as eye-candy to draw in new users, go ahead.

Moderate this as "Useless" as I can't draw graphics either. Gimme ASCII and a big fat crayon and I'll be happy.

Re:I Turn Them Off Anyway

jordan on 2002-07-09T19:17:06

Yeah, I agree. What Icons?

I always go to "Light" mode on Slash sites. I really prefer the clean look of content, without somebody else's idea of visual design. I wish all sites had a "Light" mode. It's the way the Web was meant to be.

commentary on existing icons

n1vux on 2002-07-09T19:09:22

I'd say most of the existing icons only need to have WHITE set to Transparent to be useful. (Might be able to just close some sections that only have 1..3 posts in 'em though.)

  • Events -- Good concept, busy background
    Maybe the Events icon could have the sky airbrushed to transparent. Otherwise a conflagration of camels seems quite appropriate.
  • Modules -- could use something Different. Maybe Camels stacked like elephants on a tortoise? How do you draw a modular camel? Camels with Lego-like attachment points?
  • Perl 6 -- ??
    If Perl is a camel, what is Perl 6? Maybe a camel with racing number 6 on the saddle?
  • TCL -- Keep (but)
    It is considered poor icon practice to use monolinguistic oral puns to get connotation in visual language. And since Tickle-me-Elmo refers indirectly through a specific spinoff product, this is really a reach. But it's marvellous, so I woulnd't change it even though it's WRONG.  ;-)
  • Python -- Keep.
    At least this is not a linguistic pun, but an actual reference to the non-animal source of the name. Keep.
  • Release -- how about a camel escaping from a gate?
    [ A Railfan magazine just ran a picture of a camel being lead off a RBB&B Circus Train car, not sure if it would reduce to an icon nicely.]
  • Windows -- Less contentious than  /. 's. Keep.
  • Llama -- Why not?
    Should have a Learning Perl section with a Llama icon!
  • Unix -- OK
    Existing is probably better than using an Ox or harem-guard.  ;-) [modulo transparency, but then Unix isn't very]

cheers,
bill uu.net!world!wdr etc

Elmo

jdavidb on 2002-07-10T13:33:27

I'm sooo slow. (Witness my response to the really good pun about "faster than C" during Damian's Time::Space::Continuum talk.) It took me about a month of reading use Perl; to get the pun involved with Elmo and TCL.

I had always pronounced "Tee Cee Ell," so it wasn't immediately apparent. I thought the icon was saying TCL was a Sesame Street language.  :)

Re:commentary on existing icons

bart on 2002-07-13T11:19:06

n1vux wrote:
  • Events [...] Otherwise a conflagration of camels seems quite appropriate.
  • Modules [...] Maybe Camels stacked like elephants on a tortoise? How do you draw a modular camel? Camels with Lego-like attachment points?
  • Perl 6 [...] If Perl is a camel, what is Perl 6? Maybe a camel with racing number 6 on the saddle?
  • Release -- how about a camel escaping from a gate?
  • Llama -- Why not?
    Should have a Learning Perl section with a Llama icon!
I would strongly suggest to dump all references to camels and llama's. Yes I'm still pissed off at O'Reilly for their [IMO] ridiculous attitude with regards to the association between a camel and Perl.

Dump the lot. I don't want it any more. We don't need it.

Size of images

alessio on 2002-07-10T08:11:03

One problem I see is that all icons should have a similar size. I usually use a simple script that acts as a wrapper to imagemagick and rearranges all icons to a fixed area value. An icon can then be taller or wider than the others, but they look the same size.

This thing looks very obvious on the topic list page.

Transparency

octo on 2002-07-10T08:21:42

While I love transparency in PNGs and I love seeing other webmasters to turn to PNG and use it's features, there still is a downside. Namely that few browsers just don't have propper support for it. This is true for Opera (all versions before 6), Netscape 4.x and (of course..) MSIE (up to the highest version, AFAIK). You can check wether your browser has propper transparency support for PNGs by checking out this Transparency Test [entropymine.com].

But as for most bugs (or features?) in MSIE there is a workaround. In this particular case there's more than one, but the easiest do accomplish is certainly saving a background-image with the PNG. This can be done very easyly with the GIMP and helps a lot, since lots of browsers don't do real transparency, but they have full alpha blending relative to the image's background.

Just something I wanted to note just so you don't get into this "won't run in IE, so I won't use this" position..

Regards,
-octo

Re:Transparency

pudge on 2002-07-10T12:55:21

Well, worst-case is to just use GIF, too.  :-)

Re:Transparency

dc2000 on 2002-07-11T14:55:20

I am satisfied with the current topic logos,
but the punctuation in the background of the
Download Perl logo looks out of focus.

http://www.perl.org/Images/download_perl.gif

dc

Re:Transparency

n1vux on 2002-07-12T16:40:14

So IE only works with PNG transparency at 4bit color, which is what truely iconic icons always used in the old days, and probably SHOULD still be using anyway, if they're really icons and not miniature JPEGs. So maybe the Camel crowd scene can't stay photo-reallistic and have transparency ... unless someone photoshops it to use a real old GIF format.

BSD daemon

Silver on 2002-07-11T21:38:20

Not exactly relevant, but looking at the page of images made me think of it: There's a (defunct) place in the mall called (IIRC) Cin City, which apparently sold cinnamon rolls and cookies and things. I'm going to have to get a picture of their signage before it gets taken down, because their logo is the BSD daemon with a chef's hat and, I think, a cinnamon roll on his pitchfork. The first time I saw it, I had one of those "That's familiar, but so out of place I can't figure out why" moments.

I have some suggestions

Dominus on 2002-07-12T03:22:52

Hope this helps

Some Toss-Ins

chaoticset on 2002-07-12T07:52:38

Here's a camel with a 6 banner per earlier suggestion, and a mutated penny like the one Dominus suggested for donation requests.