The free Silk icon set looks to be in the wild, I have seen it on more sites than I can count now. No wonder, the set is beautiful, and best of all completely free. My kudos to the author on a beautiful set, and bold move to make them free.
It’s hard to criticize a free meal that’s 99% delicous, unfair even, but there’s one tiny thing that bugs me. Although beautiful, the feed icon (
) lacks the bottom left dot that’s part of the now standardized feed icon. Does this bother anyone else? Does it even matter? Creative mandate, or style over usability?
Excellent post Joen.
Before butchering this matter back to the stone age. I would like to start out by saying that Mark James is an amazing artist, creating loads of stunning icons.
Hmm.. Taking away the dot, that is the question. Is it a desperate way of saying “Look at me, mine is better?” Is it a way of going against the system? OR, was it intented as only a harmless way of change?
Of course a little variation here and there is good or else we’d just get bored. But when it comes down to these little things like the feed icon, who was originally created by Matt Brett, it just leaves me with the thought of “Why the sudden urge to change it?”
As the original is being used by thousands of sites, firefox and the coming IE7. This little devil continues it’s way through the world wide web, spreading by the second.
I wouldn’t call myself old school, but seriously. There are somethings you don’t mess with, in this case the feed icon.
Good points.
I agree with the fact that it wasn’t a very good idea to remove the dot, though I suspect the reasons for doing so might be different than those you mention. Actually, I suspect it was a “flick of the wrist” design decision to remove the dot because with only 16×16 pixels to make do with, removing the dot might have bought some real estate elsewhere.
Now this is where I think extra time should’ve been spent making the icon work, WITH the dot.
Point taken. I tend to get a little carried away at times.
My Goals for 2006: Stress less. Start yoga. Be less grumpy.
I think only people who can handle the change will notice it.
Very good point, James. It’s orange and got curves… it’s a feed icon I guess
[...] Upon the release of the Silk Icon Set, Joen of noscope noted that: Although beautiful, the feed icon (Feed) lacks the bottom left dot that
A bit late on the response, but I entirely agreed with the feed icon being an issue, which is why in the next release (coming within the week) it will look like this:
(The official icon with a slight silk style applied).
I’ll square the blame onto the fact that I had not seen the ‘official’ icon when I made the original (I’m not even sure it was available at the time), hopefully this one is more to peoples liking.
Mark James said:
Extremely cool! And might I repeat how great I think your icons look, and how cool it is that you give them away freely.
The standard icon is hardly brilliant anyway, actually to be honest I think its rubbish and says nothing relevant so it wouldn’t bother me.
meet said:
You’re referring to the standard feed icon, right?
Well, I agree it’s not brilliant, but the fact that it’s an orange square with a recognizable symbol on it is buckloads better than “RSS Feed” or “Syndicate using XML“, IMHO.
Yaarg! If you hadn’t have told me, I would have never noticed. Now I’ll have to use the standard one. Just kidding – I think it all has to do with personal preference. I don’t care either way.
Steven said:
I’d like to point your attention to Mark’s comment where he states that the official silk icon has actually been updated now.
If you love the original Silk Icons pack then check out my own Silk Icons Companion pack which provides more of the same!
[)amien