I’ve created an icon for ardour. It is based on the concept of ‘ardour’ as a burning passion. The orange flame rises out of the red ‘record’ button. Here’s the icon in SVG form:
I’ve developed it off and on over the course of about a year. I think this icon is more noticeable and pleasing than the current icon.
I have to say, if I saw the icon alone, I certainly wouldn’t associate it with ardour, much less any kind of audio related software. I think an icon needs to represent something easily identifiable with the software it’s made for - or at least have something that relates to the category of software. Examples:
Anybody who’s used audacity will instantly relate to this icon. Even if they had never heard of audacity, they could easily guess that it’s an audio related application, simply from the icon alone (even though the quality of this icon isn’t so great).
I think this is another icon you have created (am I correct?) Though this still isn’t great in respect to icons, it’s still better than the one you linked above. You can easily establish that the icon belongs to an audio application.
When I see the one you just linked to, I don’t think “audio application”. In fact, the first thing that came to my mind was ‘gas’ heh. I’d suggest you keep working on one, maybe find a new angle? Good luck! =)
I did encounter this icon before (I think it’s the default in demudi, not sure…) : http://70.24.158.31:8080/images/Ardour-Record-Blue-2.svg
though I didn’t know where it came from. I still prefere this one. more audio related. The one with the flames makes me think of a cd burning application.
Think about logos too. Personally, I prefer simpler line-art / stay away from photographic elements. I’d prefer focusing on the letter “A” (upper or lower case) as a starting point. Do not get fancy.
Look at the site here in the upper left corner, just text, clean, simple, works.
Well… yes it is simple. But I think we could add a keyword or 2 to the requirements of a good icon :
Simple
You know it's about audio when you see it : the audacity logo is a good example.
You can also use it as a logo : Linuxsampler did that well. I always thought Ardour was missing a logo somewhere, we could have desktop backgrounds, t-shirts, tatoos, piercings, stockings... (hehe)
Like the icon for Cubase, or Reason, or even ProTools??? uhm, on second thought, the icons for those widely used applications have nothing to do with anything related to audio…
i can’t actually attach it here, but if anyone uses the tango icon theme, the icon ‘audio-input-microphone.svg’ is what i use for the ardour icon on my desktop dock thingy. obviously it couldn’t be copied verbatim but the idea of the microphone (its an old vintage ribbon mic looking thing) i think fits very well with ardour’s emphasis on recording (over sequencing).