SymPy Live iPhone icon

[Aaron Meurer]

Hi.

Now that we have a pretty decent mobile version of SymPy Live (if you
haven't seen it recently, visit live.sympy.org on your mobile device),
I think people will want to use the feature on their iPhones and iPod
touches that lets you add an icon to the home screen (see
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/19/iphone-101-add-mobile-websites-to-home-screen/).

So I've been playing around with the icon. If you just use the SymPy
icon straight, with the transparent background, it puts it on a
background, which looks very ugly. I used the color palette that one
of the GCI students came up with (see
http://www.google-melange.com/gci/task/view/google/gci2011/7228307),
and created some background colors. I've attached a picture of the
palette with the SymPy logo superimposed on top of each color. I've
also attached screen shots from my iPhone of what these look like when
they become iPhone icons.

What do people think? Do any of these stand out as the best? Perhaps
we could do even better (like a gradient or something). That would
require me learning how to use a graphics editing program more
advanced than Mac OS X's Preview...

Disregard the orientation of the image. These were slapped together
quickly. Just look at the background color.

The iPhone screenshots show the logos in a folder, and I also included
a shot of two of them over a background, so you can see what that
might look like too.

Aaron Meurer

[Joachim Durchholz]

The thing to keep in mind is that people recognize icons more by shape
than by color.

So a muted background color that does not stand out too much is good,
and make sure that it contrasts crisply with the snake-with-cube symbol.

Anything that blurs the outline is bad. If you want a gradient, you need
to add contour lines to the symbol.

It is possible that the symbol will look good without a background color
if you add a black outline (so it stands out on a light background), and
then a white outline (so it stands out on a dark background).
The scheme might look better if you don't use white and black but some
light and dark grey.

I don't have any preference beyond that. Judging smartphone images from
how they look on a laptop simply doesn't work, and what looks good on a
uniformly-colored background can look bad on a fractal one and vice versa.