New App Icon

[Spyral]

Probably the least important thing, but because I see it all day I decided to make this thread anyway.

I personally think the white border around the new icon looks really weird, kinda like it‘s inside a folder. I believe it would look better without the border.

Again nothing big, but it‘s bugging me a bit.

 

[lookslikerain]

I agree. In general the icon looks a bit more cartoonish than the last one, which I always thought was really elegant, but I have no sense for what kind of icons are most likely to get/keep new users (since I assume everyone currently using Pleco is going to keep using it regardless of the icon).

 

[Shun]

I like the roundness of the new icon’s font, though I agree, it may be nice to let users switch between a few different icons, with the current one as default. Personally, I like a shiny gold look for the 魚 with the KaiTi font on a red background, with a golden rounded rectangle border around it. Here's a quickly cooked-up example, everything (thickness, height, color) can be modified:



https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Golden_Text/

This is more a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, and the red corners would have to become transparent.

 

[gregash26]

I'm with lookslikerain. As soon as I saw the new icon, I was really sad. If I had to update the old icon, I'd possibly change the character font color to plain white like the new one. I'd maybe update the blue background. But otherwise I wouldn't have touched it. And I hope I don't hurt anyone's feelings when I say the character in the new logo looks like the comic sans of Chinese.

But I have absolutely no experience with graphic design so feel free to ignore this entire post. lol

 

[mikelove]

The new icon was sort of a hacked-together last minute thing; originally we had a weird cool obviously-just-a-beta AI-generated Pleco, but we decided using AI art on even a goofy beta icon might be problematic in some circles, so we threw together this one instead.

That being said, we probably are going to switch to something more YuanTi/HeiTi-style like this (albeit perhaps against a different backdrop), because the new thing on Android - and, I suspect, a future iOS update - is to let people change the outlines + color shapes of icons to match their device theme, and we need something that’s bold and clear enough to still be recognizable as a tiny low-contrast shape in the middle of a triangle or whatever.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t also offer the option to switch to the old icon, at least on iOS.

 

[mikelove]

If anyone's curious, here's that AI icon:

 

[mikelove]

(I suppose another option would be to hire a real-life artist who was willing to produce a human-made piece of art based on the idea from this AI one, I don't think we'd be likely to use this as our *default* icon in any case but maybe as another alternate one at least)