User:Agryson

=Public Notes= =Artwork Guidelines=

Icon Anatomy
A FreeCAD icon is composed of 6 elements which can be remembered easily using the awkward acronym "SALCHO": Stroke, Alignment, Lighting, Color, Highlighting, Outline

Here's a concrete, yet arbitrary example:

The following sections explain these elements in a more structured way.

Colors [Obligatory]
FreeCAD uses a palette adapted from the Tango palette. Each main color comes in 4 tones: Highlight, Base, Dark and Outline.

Grid & Stroke Width [Obligatory]
FreeCAD Icons are 64px*64px nominal size (Though I like to leave a 2px margin all around to prevent funky antialiasing things from happening on the image edge). When creating or editing an icon, make sure your document size is 64 x 64 with the units being px.

It's also strongly recommended to apply at least one grid to the document that has a grid line every pixel and a major grid line every 2 pixels. Feel free to add other grids to help out, but you should have at least that one. You're strokes would then be aligned along the minor grid intersections. (See image)

Strokes should be no thinner than 2px, with rounded caps and corners in most cases. Strokes can be thicker, but aim for a multiple of two to minimise scaling fuzziness.

Outline [Obligatory]
Basing yourself on the main color of the icon, ensure that there is a dark outline (of 2px as mentioned earlier). This works in union with the highlight to ensure good form contrast on multiple background tones.

Highlight [Strongly Advised]
Using the Highlight color, add an internal stroke (again, 2px) to help make that outline pop. On dark backgrounds, it's this highlight that will be providing the form to the icon.

Lighting [Optional]
As per Tango guidelines, if you're adding a gradient lighting effect, try to make it look like the light is coming from the top left. This is done by adding the highlight color up top left and the Base or Dark color bottom right (notice that I haven't played around trying to use a non-palette color)

Conclusion
That's it - that's all I do to make sure that there's a unified look to all the icons. Remember: SALCHO Stroke, Alignment, Lighting, Color, Highlight, Outline