4 ms·

i think increased screen resolution (and smaller sized devices) led to a pixel art identity crisis. as you mentioned, everything today is expected to scale and

i think increased screen resolution (and smaller sized devices) led to a pixel art identity crisis. as you mentioned, everything today is expected to scale and fit on any sized screen. that wasn't the case when everything was explicitly designed for monitors with a resolution between 800x600 and 1024x768. the nice pixel art of windows 98 wouldn't really translate well to both a phone, a desktop computer, and a big screen TV at the same time. except i doubt that's the entire story, because even though pixel art doesn't scale well, you could make very nice, detailed, inspired, responsive vector graphics using SVG, which would scale up or down to any size. but that probably would cost way too much money to produce, so we're now in the era where companies have brazenly embraced 'phoning it in' as an aesthetic (e.g. material icons, bootstrap, font awesome, etc.). so far, users have either put up with it, or have been tricked into embracing it too

karmakaze 4y ago
I'd probably be ok using an upscaler like the ones used for retrogaming. Probably not a very professional image for a mainstream OS though.
- nyanpasu64 4y ago
  I've fed Silk icons into xBRZ and Waifu2x, and the results coming out were not pleasing to the eye (xBRZ can't handle antialiased input well).
  - karmakaze 4y ago
    I looked up the Silk icons and they appear to be about half the dimensions (1/4 area) and high color. I was thinking that there were upscalers that targeted and worked well with 16-color/more pixelated images.
CGamesPlay 4y ago
SVG isn't necessarily the panacea you're making it out to be. If you have a highly detailed SVG that looks great at large sizes, when you rasterize it at low resolutions, it looks like a gray soup.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  Haiku's icon format[0] seems to solve this issue: not only it supports per-shape level of detail, allowing elements of an icon to be hidden, appear or replaced based on the icon scale size, it is also much smaller than SVG (supposedly average size for Haiku icons is 500-700 bytes) so it can be used directly. [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon-o-matic.html https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon...
- giantrobot 4y ago
  You can make SVGs responsive based on their raster size[0] using media queries. So there's no need for a grey soup when the icon is rastered at small dimensions. [0] http://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsive-with-css/ http://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsiv...
  - deadbeeves 4y ago
    That's something the browser is doing, not something the SVG renderer is doing. Someone still has to make multiple versions of the same image with different levels of detail, and some software still needs to pick the right one for a given resolution.

karmakaze 4y ago

I'd probably be ok using an upscaler like the ones used for retrogaming. Probably not a very professional image for a mainstream OS though.

nyanpasu64 4y ago
I've fed Silk icons into xBRZ and Waifu2x, and the results coming out were not pleasing to the eye (xBRZ can't handle antialiased input well).
- karmakaze 4y ago
  I looked up the Silk icons and they appear to be about half the dimensions (1/4 area) and high color. I was thinking that there were upscalers that targeted and worked well with 16-color/more pixelated images.

CGamesPlay 4y ago

SVG isn't necessarily the panacea you're making it out to be. If you have a highly detailed SVG that looks great at large sizes, when you rasterize it at low resolutions, it looks like a gray soup.

badsectoracula 4y ago
Haiku's icon format[0] seems to solve this issue: not only it supports per-shape level of detail, allowing elements of an icon to be hidden, appear or replaced based on the icon scale size, it is also much smaller than SVG (supposedly average size for Haiku icons is 500-700 bytes) so it can be used directly. [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon-o-matic.html https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon...
giantrobot 4y ago
You can make SVGs responsive based on their raster size[0] using media queries. So there's no need for a grey soup when the icon is rastered at small dimensions. [0] http://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsive-with-css/ http://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsiv...
- deadbeeves 4y ago
  That's something the browser is doing, not something the SVG renderer is doing. Someone still has to make multiple versions of the same image with different levels of detail, and some software still needs to pick the right one for a given resolution.