Celestia Icon Redesign

[FarGetaNik]

A while ago Alexell had me redesign the Celestia icon, but I never was statisfied with the changes he had me do. On my own efford I designed an icon that is more appealing to my taste.

Considering modern icon designs focus on more simple and flat designs I revisited the Celestia icon and created a non-shaded version:

I'm using Celestia's font color, but replaced the gold from the startup logo with gray.

Here the image in icon format and the shaded version I've been using prior:

celestia-icon-c11-c12.zip

(119.14 KiB) Downloaded 190 times

I'm kinda annoyed the messy icon I designed back when is still used for the forum. It's just not fitting for this purpose. Any thoughts?

[Art Blos]

Suspiciously familiar colors.

[Anthony_B_Russo10]

It looks quite interesting.

[Askaniy]

I'm kinda annoyed the messy icon I designed back when is still used for the forum. It's just not fitting for this purpose.

I support. In this style, you can probably repeat the remaining letters in "Celestia" to add to the logo/splash.

[fyr02]

I like the colors, but I feel like the black outline ruins the look kinda.

[Lafuente_Astronomy]

Is it ok for me to disgaree with this logo? I know the trend of organizations and groups with their logos nowadays is to simplify them and also make them look modernistic, but I personally think the old logo looks better and actually represents what Celestia is. Otherwise, if you want to simplify it into a simplified version, perhaps I suggest that the color of the "C" be greyish-white, like the color of Saturn's rings, and the circle itself have the colors of Saturn. Bonus points if you want to include a hexagon shape at the center of the circle. For reference:

[fyr02]

Hmmm.... Silver for the rings would contrast nicely with the golden color of saturn

[Anthony_B_Russo10]

Lafuente_Astronomy does make a point.

[Lafuente_Astronomy]

I tried to make a variant of the logo using the colors from the image I presented as reference. Well, it doesn't look as good as I hoped it would because I used Paint, as you can tell there are some "imperfections" present. Well, anyway, here it is:

Attempting to simplify a logo.png (30.83 KiB) Viewed 6571 times

Added after 1 minute 8 seconds:
Either way, perhaps this is a better reference:

[fyr02]

My version, which was made from c10a and c11b.

embocel.png (50.27 KiB) Viewed 6548 times

[FarGetaNik]

fyr02, I did the black outlines to ensure it's still visible on any background. Some of my earlier versions didn't have these so depending on your background it would pop or blend in... which is not what an icon should do.

Lafuente_Astronomy, I'm not sure to what degree I should simplify the logo. I wanted it to look like it originated from this time and age, and not some early 2000s operating system. I was thinking of adding some simple flat shading (no complex gradient like previously) but idk how to go about it yet.

As for the color, we need some kind of contrast. If we stay at realistic colors (I imagine some silvery-white and a brownish gold) it's hard to find a color scheme that looks somewhat neat. I will really refrain from adding any texture to it cause that does not scale well into an icon. I will play around with it a bit more.

Remember this is not a splash image but an icon that is used in shortcuts and stuff and will most likely only be a couple pixels tall. This little thing needs to easily display the program with the help of a recognizable shape, contrast and well colors... and I'm not sure what colors can serve this purpose.

Added after 1 hour 28 minutes:
Alright I did some changes in color scheme and added a few highlights.

Added after 3 minutes 5 seconds:
I could also highlight the B ring if desired, not sure how that'll turn out.

Added after 6 minutes 4 seconds:
Something like this maybe: