Reply To: Iconography

[Glenn Millam]

Charles Wilcox wrote: Some general characteristics that seem to be common in my ideas, and things I think would be good discriminators:
– we want something that is visually clear and immediately evident to any viewer. No offense, but some of the pictures here could use work in this category.
– we want pictures that are worth a thousand words. Thus the idea of instructional illustrations or animations that tell the story succinctly.
– we want to capture people’s imaginations, thus the artistic style I referenced with sci-fi magazines. Of course, we don’t want that to go overboard and make it seem too fantastic and futuristic. This is plausible technology… or “hard sci-fi”.

I agree. Personally, I think you guys have done a nice job on the site and the forum areas, and I like the place. But some things can be done to enhance the credibility of the project simply by upping the values of the graphics on the site, as well as having these graphics unified into the general look-and-feel you have established with the site’s redesign.

One particular graphic I would like to clean up is the diagram of the Plasma Focus device itself. I’ve seen this same graphic used in other places (Wikipaedia, etc) and it looks like it is, a quick and dirty scan of something that came out of an old plotter. What if it were redone cleanly in Illustrator, then saved out as a PNG or JPEG with careful settings to avoid artifacts? And with some color? Attached is a quick example.

Attached files