Grasshopper Icon vector source

NOTE: This post is out-dated. Please visit the newer post which features source for the new icon style.

Dear 3rd Party Component developers,

we at the Grasshopper® development team (hereafter GDT) are thrilled by your enthusiasm to develop custom components and widen the base of the Grasshopper platform. We feel it is important your products become an integral part of Grasshopper, and are therefore shocked... shocked and appalled at the quality of icons we've seen so far (yes, Jon, that means you).

In order to facilitate this process, the GDT (unanimously) agreed to make the source for all the original icon images available online. They have been attached to this post for the time being, but we hope to centralize all developer resources someday soon.

You are free to copy and modify these graphics in any way you see fit. They come free of copyright and copyleft restrictions.

You'll need XaraX to open these files (a free 30-day evaluation is available, but it's cheap and really quite good, the GDT highly recommends it for any sort of vector-based computer graphics development).

Also note that almost all icons used in Grasshopper have a drop-shadow applied to them (2 pixel blur, 1 pixel offset towards the right and bottom, 50% opacity). This typically means you should refrain from drawing anything in the 2 outermost pixel columns/rows, otherwise the shadow will visually intersect with the icon edge.

GDT

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on April 27, 2010 at 5:37pm

this is so funny! i guess i have to up my icon making skills!

Permalink Reply by Ángel Linares on April 27, 2010 at 5:44pm

Nice solution :) Someone ask me two days ago about what is better "good design" or "quality information"...indeed both.

Best.

Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on April 27, 2010 at 6:38pm

while on the topic can the icon be changed to 32x32, they would read better on the component when you have "view icons" on

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 28, 2010 at 1:21am

Hi Robert,

that would require you to make two icons for every component, as you cannot scale icons without losing crispness. Also, drawing icons is actually pretty computationally expensive, so the larger the icons the slower the redraw.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 28, 2010 at 1:57am

Yeah, it's not like those two are in any way mutually exclusive. It's probably somewhat biased towards good design for beginners and towards quality information for intermediate+expert users.

Which is better, dying from chicken pox or small pox?

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on April 27, 2010 at 6:43pm

Hi David,
Thanks for posting these. I was wondering if it might be possible for you to export them to an Adobe Illustrator file as well. I downloaded the trial version of Xara... but since I don't have the Pro version... it doesn't seem like I can edit many of the files. So, I tried exporting the files to an .AI file (which seems to be doable) and it worked reasonably well on the first try (I exported the Icons_Vector file)... but then I tried to proceed to the other groups of icons and had a lot of problems. It kept throwing an error every time I tried to export the files. And Illustrator wouldn't recognize the corrupted files (although it did open the Vector file fine). Anyway, since you have the Pro version, would you mind exporting the files as an Illustrator file too? Thanks again.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 28, 2010 at 1:24am

Really? I would have thought only the features in Pro would be missing, and I'm not using any of them to my knowledge. Xara's file format is pretty sleek and flexible, they manage a surprising degree of forward and backward compatibility.

Is there a message that shows up when opening these files?

Yes, you could export them to *.ai, but a lot of elements will be either missing or different. Transparency types, fill profiles.. you name it. There's loads of feates in XaraX that are not supported in Illustrator and vice versa.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on April 27, 2010 at 11:08pm

I thought you might mean me ;-(

Thanks for the resource, maybe you can give me some tutoring in May.....

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 28, 2010 at 1:30am

I literally just went through the gallery and picked the first uploader who posted a screenshot of custom components. It was nothing more informed than that.

My personal opinion (which may or may not differ from the GDT) is that you're not doing any worse than anybody else :)

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on April 28, 2010 at 10:15pm

Come ON! Thats a totally inspired work of...ok, kind of sort of really ripped off the t-wolves on this one...Definite point taken!

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on July 20, 2010 at 11:39pm

Well, I'd like to give public credit to To] (Tom) of [UTO] for his assistance so far in a fantastic facelift for the Geometry Gym Component icons. They are a brilliant improvement on my previous efforts (and the analysis programs I ripped them from), and so far the response from users has been great. Further comments and suggestions welcome.