miniature monochrome Druplicon

Submitted by steve harley on Thu, 2008-12-04 16:08

Hello, world! I'm Steve (aka garbanzito on d.o), growing my Drupal skills for over a year, and a team member at Growing Venture Solutions since mid-October. This is my first Planet Drupal post.

Part of my background is in print publishing, so I took on a particular challenge with the Druplicon: for various reasons, the standard Druplicon won't work well at tiny sizes, so I developed this variant for use as a glyph in printed text (on the order of 2 mm for a "bullet"—even smaller than the favicon).

I used solid color instead of shading to avoid losing detail such as the face among the halftone dots. I also exaggerated details for better recognition at small sizes and to adjust for the properties of printing presses. I chose to fill most of the drop with solid color to make it a darker mark on the page, more like a typical bullet. The result is not intended to be "correct" at a larger size. The glyph is a single composite curve for cleaner scaling and transparency in PostScript usage, and its color is 100% Black in the CMYK color mode.

The image shown is for display—for production use, start with the PDF file attached (editable Illustrator CS2). The design is approximately 200x230 mm (about 100 times the intended size, depending on your usage). GPL2 license embedded.

Attachment	Size
druplicon_bullet.pdf	196.8 KB

Comments

Not the best Druplicon I've

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2008-12-04 21:54.

Not the best Druplicon I've seen but does serve people with fascination with monochromatic images.

If you want people to actually "use" your work under GPL, try sharing the source file, not the PDF version.

Yeah, it's not supposed to

Submitted by steve harley on Thu, 2008-12-04 22:28.

Yeah, it's not supposed to compete on looks, it's supposed to work at 2mm on an offset press. Printing the standard Druplicon under those conditions, even converted to unshaded color, will result in the thin lines disappearing, the point of the drop looking like a vague bump, the eyes splitting into two shapes, and the mouth and nose disappearing. So the aesthetics must bend somewhat to functional constraints.

More importantly, perhaps I need to emphasize that the PDF is the source file. It is saved as PDF with all "source" outlines completely editable in Illustrator. There is no other version—this is the same file I developed it in.