[Tango-artists] Virtual Machines icons

[Christian Hammond]

Hi.

I'm a little concerned that the VM icons won't really shout out "Virtual
machines!" to people. I assume the basis for these icons is the old VMware
Workstation icon (which is being completely redone for Workstation 6.0). The
problem is that a computer next to a monitor doesn't imply virtual machines
in any way, and I think it would take a little outside the box thinking to
come up with an icon that signifies this while staying product-independent.

I'm working on trying to get most of the Tango icons for VMware released
under the CC, though it'll take some time to go through legal. However,
trademarks are an issue, so I don't know that we'll actually be able to
contribute back our VM or product icons. The logo is of course the key
problem, as people technically need a license to reproduce it (as with any
company's trademark). I think there could also be a potential issue with
basing something off of our old logo (as generic as it looked) and then
sticking our competitors' logos inside of it in place of our own. Which
should be fine, they should all look unique anyway, imho.

This should just be taken as constructive criticism. As the unofficial icon
guy for VMware Workstation 6, I kind of have an interest in seeing good,
well-thought out Tango icons for things related to virtual machines. I'd
like to see something good that we could potentially reuse in the future.
However, I'm not sure creating a generic VM icon is the right way to go
about this. A VMware VM is very different from a Xen VM, which is very
different from a Parallels VM. They should probably end up looking unique
(assuming we're talking about files). Things aren't at a stage yet where
everybody can use everybody else's VMs, and I don't know that it'll get
there any time soon, so it's probably best to distinguish them.

(Insert obligatory IANAL here, these are my personal opinions, etc.)

Christian


On 1/18/07, jEsuSdA 8) <jesusda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Some virtualmachine icons.
>
> A generic one, VMware, VirtualBox and Qemu.
>
> Salu2 de jEsuSdA 8)
> --
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tango-artists mailing list
> Tango-artists at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/tango-artists
>
>
>
>


-- 
Christian Hammond - chipx86 at chipx86.com
VMware, Inc.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/tango-artists/attachments/20070119/50322546/attachment.html