Zen Road | Blog | icon competition | August

zen road blog

27. August 2005

icon competition

Placed online: 27.08.2005 at 15:26 by Paul Buller
Category:

Zen Road has a little [A tiny picture of Philippe Coupey in a 16x16 dot matrix] 16×16 pixel logo appearing next to the URL when the website’s address is typed in to a browser. The little picture is also displayed if you save a bookmark of Zen Road (1). In a long list of bookmarks or browser window tabs, the icon helps you to identify the site easily.

Some regular visitors to Zen Road have asked what the current icon is supposed to be, others have expressed dislike of it, saying the website should have something more representative, more identifying as a logo.

I don’t mind too much either way. When Zen Road was growing rapidly in Spring 2005 I didn’t have much time to spend on the graphic aspect of the site but just needed a quick solution to give it some visual identity. The idea for the icon was a photo of Philippe Coupey taken at the Gorenzen sesshin in the Harz Mountains in February this year. These (heavily pixelated) zoomed up versions and the original picture show how the icon was created, working from right to left:

[A tiny picture of Philippe Coupey in a 16x16 dot matrix] [The same picture zoomed by a factor of 2 in a 32x32 dot matrix] [The original photo without the pixelation of the other pictures]

Competition for a New Icon

There are many artists and design-minded people among Philippe’s followers, so I was wondering if they could apply their artistic and communication skills in designing a new logo for the site.

The idea is quite simple: to make a design which sums up the essence of Zen Road. It may be the silhouette or outline of someone sitting in zazen, it may be a tiny sketch of a road going off into the mountains or a rickety footbridge over a raging torrent. These ideas are quite beyond my illustrative skills.

The only constraint is to make it work in a 16×16 pixel matrix.

In fact it would be a good idea to sketch it this way, in large coloured squares making up a 16×16 box. The fourth picture from left in the sequence above illustrates this.

If the idea appeals to you, you can send your proposal to me (Paul) or to Elaine. (If you have worked on paper, you will obviously have to scan it and send it to us from your own mail program.) The winner of the Icon Competition will be rewarded in some appropriate way (Elaine: any ideas?)

If you would like just to make a quick suggestion for the theme of the icon, then you can write a comment below.

(1) The icon does not show up in all browsers. It should work in Firefox, Mozilla, Safari and Opera. It may work in Internet Explorer, but also may not.

9 responses to “icon competition”

1

“The winner of the Icon Competition will be rewarded in some appropriate way (Elaine: any ideas?)”

Winner will receive infinite merit and free cake & coffee during the next Sans Demeure summer camp.

27. August 2005 at 19:15 by Elaine
2

Yesterday and today I heard from Elaine that at least three people are brainstorming to produce a new Zen Road icon. This is great news as they are all graphic experts. I’ve tried myself and although I’m no artist, I would like to explain how I do this in Photoshop in case you are wondering how to “paint” such a tiny picture.

First start Photoshop and open a new, empty file. Set the width and height to 16 pixels, RGB colour scheme and Transparent background. A tiny square will appear. This is too small to work with, so zoom the size to 1600%. Now there is a large empty square that you can fill with content.

Here is a sort of Golden Gate Bridge with flowing water underneath, nothing very spectacular. While working in Photoshop it looked like this:

and when saved as a GIF file with transparent background the finished icon looks like this:

Perhaps not enough to earn infinite merit, but I hope you get the point.

09. September 2005 at 20:20 by Paul Buller
3

Let’s forget my Golden Gate Bridge (!), it was only an example.

Just arrived from Paris, here is the first serious entry for the competition:

10. September 2005 at 13:33 by Paul Buller
4

I rather like you Golden Gate bridge. It reminds me of good times in San Francisco.
What is the new arrival from Paris? An anarchists bomb with the fuse lit? A bowl of stew with the handle of the ladle sticking out? :-)
I look forward eagerly to more entries.

15. September 2005 at 15:08 by Rory Dryden
5

Yeah Rory, good on yer, sport. Hope the wait was worth it.
Here’s another contender from Paris. More pushy this one, but closer to the road theme:
Very nice.

28. September 2005 at 19:32 by Paul Buller
6

Crooked and to the point. I like it. No speed limit I hope.

05. October 2005 at 13:31 by Rory Dryden
7

No 5 is it!!!
Paul, i try to get some café latte for you, during the next camp.
PS: what do you thing about putting the Z into a green circle. should symbolise the green light of a traffic light (robot in afrikaans). in other words, we got the green light all the way!

08. October 2005 at 16:03 by jonas
8

I think the competition has gone on long enough now.
The final date for submissions is Friday 11th November 2005.

If no further (and better!) proposals have been received by then, we will use the black Z from Elaine as the website logo. Everyone agreed?

06. November 2005 at 14:04 by Paul Buller
9

And the winner is…

OK, the little black Z has won the competition and should now show up in your browser when you are surfing Zen Road. When I go to Zen Road my browser now looks like this:

It may be that the black does not appear in your browser at first. This happened to me: the miniature head of Philippe still appeared after I had written this comment.

It turns out that many browsers handle these little icons in a special way and hang onto them, not refreshing the content. You may find you have to tell your browser to delete its cache, then press the Refresh button to make the little black Z appear.

If you are using Internet Explorer you will probably experience that the icon is not displayed at all. Like this:

Look, no icon!

13. November 2005 at 19:08 by Paul Buller