WinDirStat icons

Hi folks,

tuqueque sent me the logo project just recently. So tonight I sat down to play a bit with what we got. Since I’m not quite so brilliant with graphics, I had to rely on a little help from IconWorkshop to get this done. The (3D) result, to me, looks pretty convincing for Vista/7 style … however, even the 2D version looks quite nice.

Behold (oh, and click for full resolution) :mrgreen:
2D icons
3D icons

Which version(s) would you prefer? Should I go for another color instead (see previous post)? Do you think that the 3D-effect should not be shown at some of the resolutions where it now exists or be shown at resolutions that are now flat?

For those who want to test it on their desktop or in some folder, please download the 2D-version and/or the 3D-version by right-clicking the links in this sentence and then using the “Save As” functionality of your web browser. Yes, just opening it in the browser may not yield the desired result 😉

Thanks for your input,

// Oliver

PS: Please note that I went for the gray one intentionally at 16 colors. It simply looks better than any dithered and scaled down version of the colored logo …
PPS: The stuff is all in the repository.

Updates:

Changed as requested by Lozzy
3D icons
Download version
More variants
icon variant 0101
icon variant 0202
icon variant 0303
icon variant 0404
icon variant 0505
icon variant 0606
icon variant 0707
icon variant 0808
icon variant 0909
icon variant 1010
icon variant 1111
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31 Responses to WinDirStat icons

  1. Lozzy says:

    I think those are really fitting icons and the colour is perfectly fine too. Nice one!

    Couple of suggestions;

    Use the flat style on the 64px 256 icon too. The 3D effect doesn’t appear to have scaled at all elegantly. It looks like you’ve done that for the 32px and 16px 256 bit icons too, so you may as well be consistent.

    For the 3D styled icon, the main logo looks like it’s a little too close to the edge of the 3D circle. Perhaps you could introduce a little more empty green space between the main black logo and the 3D effect. Hope that makes sense!

  2. Oliver says:

    Changed, see the results above. More comments are obviously still very welcome!

    NB: please do as Lozzy did and refer to a particular version. E.g. if you already like his proposal best, but have some idea for further improvement, please make this explicit.

  3. Lozzy says:

    Ah, superb. I do think it looks better with that extra spacing there. Thanks for the preview too, it was a nice surprise XD

  4. Obmoloc says:

    While the logo might be important for a small number of people, what we really need now are performance enhancements. Is has been five years since the last release, and since then we suffer from bad performance due to parallel scanning of many directories (no file system is optimized for this).

    People looking for a tool such as WinDirStat are not looking for poneys. You may have the monopoly for now, but some people are being pissed with the lack of releases. Eventually, somebody will get your GPL code to implement the needed enhancements, or Microsoft might buy treemap rights of someone to deliver this tool natively for Windows.

    You might loose opportunity to consolidate this marvelous tool.

  5. Oliver says:

    Excuse me?

    I have a day job and it’s actually comments like yours that are destroying, rather than building motivation. And motivation is all you need when you have a day job, do overtime and then need the last bit of energy that day to work on some spare time project. Mind you, WDS is not my only project …

    Is has been five years since the last release, and since then we suffer from bad performance due to parallel scanning of many directories (no file system is optimized for this).

    If no file system is optimized for this, then how is it all file systems cope so well with dozens of programs accessing it at the same time? In fact they are perfectly optimized exactly for this, but there are still faster methods (i.e. MFT parsing, but that has other tradeoffs).

    People looking for a tool such as WinDirStat are not looking for poneys. You may have the monopoly for now, but some people are being pissed with the lack of releases.

    Well, they could spend their money elsewhere … oh, wait. We offer WDS free of charge, now I remember.

    If you think it doesn’t bother me that I often don’t have the energy to sit down in the evening and spend another x hours working on WDS instead of relaxing, think again …

    Eventually, somebody will get your GPL code to implement the needed enhancements, or Microsoft might buy treemap rights of someone to deliver this tool natively for Windows.

    Well, why don’t you go ahead and fork the tool? Or better yet, why don’t you join the effort? See, there are lots of people with a lots of ideas, input, wishes … but there are sooo few actually willing to help. Such help could even be as simple as answering mails of new users who have no clue how to proceed. And even if that is not development of the software, it would save me some hours every month that I could spend in development instead. And yes, it includes questions like: “I downloaded WDS, what do I do now?” …

    // Oliver

  6. Obmoloc says:

    Sorry, I didn’t mean to destroy your motivation. You are providing a tool that saves time of many people, so don’t give-up on it. My previous message was to focus effort on more important things such as performance, but since I was pissed with personal issues, I used improper words. Forgive-me.

  7. Oliver says:

    Don’t worry, I won’t give up now that I rediscovered my motivation 😉

    In fact there are many discouraging comments time and time again, but still many more encouraging ones. It’s just that we seem to lack the critical mass to get some community going that would, for example, help to support new users or figure out problem causes etc, etc …

    But I have to tell you bad news, so to speak. The upcoming version will not focus on performance at all, because I haven’t figured out the MFT parsing completely. However, the version after that one is supposed to be entirely focused on performance and lowering resource usage. For example we were saving few bytes here and there (e.g. the rectangles for the cushions), but the really really big items were ignored (e.g. saving at least 4 bytes for each item in the tree).

    First things first 😉

    // Oliver

  8. alicroche says:

    I think it’s much better then the previous proposal but maybe you should reconsider your color choice : Green is redundant with the tree form (twice vegetal), on the other hand yellow is often used for everything related with tools or maintenance. And black on yellow is soooo cool 😉

    And the streamlined one is the best : always go for the simplest.

  9. Lozzy says:

    I’m liking variant 01. Nice and clean. Possibly variant 10 also.

    I say 01 because not only does is look sensible and clean (this isn’t a media centre application after all) but it would be easier to keep it’s vector integrity. I think having a cross compatible, easily scalable and printable logo is more important than a super flashy one.

    My 2c.

  10. Oliver says:

    Simplest does not always look good at bigger resolution. My personal favorites were also 10 and 11 (which is 10 with a shadow).

    @Lozzy: it’s not so much about a logo (see the previous post which introduced the logo including the text, which I’d be using in documentation), it’s about an icon. It’s “only” going to be visible in the taskbar and on the desktop (or whereever you out it). However, it shouldn’t look crappy over RDP connections etc.

    @alicroche: so you’d prefer yellow? Hmm, the initial thought when I saw the yellow one (one of Robin’s variants) was, that Symantec is going to go after us … they use black/yellow a lot and icons are so small that “confusing it” with another one is easily possible. And frankly I can’t afford a huge company sending its lawyers after me :mrgreen:

    I’ll see whether I can get that particular yellow back in Inkscape and will give it a whirl. But we might have to ask Symantec to give us assurance that they won’t go after us for using that color combo 😉

  11. Oliver says:

    I should add that the constraining darker circle (e.g. 01) really does have a charm to it, even without the 3D-effect.

  12. Charlie Calvert says:

    They are all nice. I suppose I like the 2D look slightly more than 3D. The green is fine with me.

    Thanks for building such a great tool. It is very useful.

  13. Outspoken says:

    Hi Oliver,

    Nice to know that WinDirStat is now being developed.
    Accidentally stumbled upon this site after a looooooong time 🙂
    Never bothered to go beyond the homepage/Download page [Because i already had the 2007 version 🙂 ].

    but this time decided to go to sourceforge and look around, and here I am.

    Can you post some beta’s (as fully built executables?).
    I am willing to try the beta’s , as long as the crashes only affect WinDirStat and don’t take the whole system down 😉

    Beta’s please, please, pretty please 🙂 ?

  14. Oliver says:

    @Outspoken: betas will have to wait for a while, given the fundamental changes I have made so far. I’ll put some alpha (i.e. quite unstable) versions up during or shortly after the weekend. I’ll include some means to create and submit crash dumps, if you hit some issues (not yet written, but I have experience with that one).

    It’s very unlikely that the pre-release versions are going to damage anything, unless you run cleanup actions. Not that those will hose your system, but I haven’t tested them lately, so there may be issues.

    I’ll post a new topic on the blog over the weekend. Already posted a note about how to build the latest stuff from the repo.

    Let’s see how many changes I manage to include in that first alpha.

    // Oliver

  15. nix says:

    I nearly always prefer flat icons. Despite the extra effort put into fancy dancy 3d/gradient/shiny icons, it ends up hurting visibility.

    An icon first and foremost needs to be able to be spotted by the eye and distinguished quickly. Adding effects actually helps camouflage an icon among piles of other icons.

    Basically, I prefer the 1st one.

    The design is well done as well, it suits this wonderful utility.

  16. cavallogoloso says:

    very good icons! this style could be OK also for splashscreen!

  17. PascalO says:

    I really love WDS new logo. #01 is my favorite one (I prefer flat icon too).
    If you finally choose to use a 3D, then pick #10.

    It’s good to know developers now care about design.

  18. Oliver says:

    Hey, it’s not like we don’t care. It’s just that we mostly suck at it. So Kudos to tuqueque, I shall emphasize 😉

  19. PascalO says:

    Tuqueque really did a great job. How did you get him to design for you ?
    Did you plan to improve WDS GUI ? Maybe you could use something like Tango Icon Library ?

    Note that WDS treemap default settings make it looks really ugly. Consider using 0 to 25 for scale factor value (treemap) tab.

    And, thanks for your work.

  20. Oliver says:

    He actually contacted me with the proposal.

    What’s so ugly about the current default?

  21. PascalO says:

    Hey, it’s only my humble opinion, maybe I’m the only one to find it ugly ^^
    It’s a bit hard to explain, but I’ll try: The treemap, with default settings, looks like an old demo (from demoscene). It looks a bit outdated, and does not fit well with the surrounding GUI. If I was a designer I could propose you something nicer, but I’m just a developer 😛

  22. Oliver says:

    I’ll check your idea and consider it. It’s more likely, however, that something like three default styles would end up as choices in the installer. You’re the first to “complain” :mrgreen:

    But don’t worry, that’s just fine if you do. After all the program was made for you guys.

  23. a says:

    01 or any non-3D variant

  24. Antoine says:

    Definitely go for the 2D variants !
    Like Lozzy,
    01 then maybe 10.

    Thanks again all the team for the only tool that has never failed me in 10 years of personal Windows use…

    Antoine

  25. ekt says:

    2d versions are the best for me too

    and as someone previously suggested, i think a yellow/orange backgorund would be nice (in another post there were some splash screen proposals, the yellow one was very nice)

    but whatever you choose, put it in. everything is better then the current one 🙂

  26. Camilo Martin says:

    Why isn’t this the icon for the actual executable?

  27. LoRDa says:

    Awesome icons man. You would want to go with the very first one, the 2D version, It’s the way of the future. IMHO 3D icons died by 2010, and good riddance!

    Also, cheers to your contributor from Venezuela, makes me a proud of how creative people are in my home country, in spite of current crises. Bien hecho!

  28. GreedyWildcard says:

    Can these be combined into a dll and distributed as part of the application? Or at least converted to .ico files placed in the install directory? I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve downloaded the PNG version of my preferred icon, and converted to ICO just to be able to use it.

  29. Oliver says:

    Yep, they’ll be included in a future build. But you can always pick the ICO files up here.

  30. GreedyWildcard says:

    Awesome! Thanks for the info – I didn’t realize all the icons were there w/ the source. No more PNG>ICO conversion, woohoo!

  31. GreedyWildcard says:

    Thanks a heap! Had no idea the ICOs were sitting right there w/ the source.
    No more PNG>ICO conversion needed, WOOHOO!

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