Need ideas for an icon

After a request by Arend I added an unflatten component for reversing a flattening operation. If you still have the original tree and the number of items hasn't changed it can be put back together:

However I just cannot come up with a good idea for an icon for Unflatten. The best I could come up with was an acorn, which is a tenuous link at best.

Any ideas welcome, but please remember that the icon must de drawable and recognizable in a 20x20 (24x24 in an emergency) pixel image.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Yoann Mescam (Systemiq) on March 15, 2013 at 6:18am

or a christmas tree ?

Permalink Reply by Erick Vásquez on March 15, 2013 at 12:24pm

Nice Systemiq, how about this? the visibility of joints, like a plastic tree.

Permalink Reply by xujiong on March 16, 2013 at 7:33am

Nice icon,how about this?

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on March 16, 2013 at 7:52am

I still think the stump and sprout are the clearest.

Permalink Reply by Chris Tietjen on March 16, 2013 at 9:46am

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on March 16, 2013 at 10:53am

Yeah it's stump+sprout without grass for the time being. It's not as pretty as the acorn but a lot more descriptive.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on March 16, 2013 at 11:22am

Saw?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on March 16, 2013 at 12:21pm

Clean Tree actually, I needed the cherries for another object which is actually called [Cherry Picker]. No more subtle visual pun I guess...

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Ángel Linares on March 15, 2013 at 8:37am

The first idea that comes to my mind was a burned forest replanted...but I know that it is quite complicate to translate into an icon.

Or perhaps a black (burned) tree with a small green branch growing.

https://www.google.es/search?q=replanted+forest&aq=f&um=1&a...

Permalink Reply by Simon on March 15, 2013 at 9:07am

Following on from the last comment you could have one tree blacked out and the smae tree with colour overlapping in front.

Permalink Reply by newy011 on March 16, 2013 at 10:04am

Do all the suggestions so far strike anyone else as well.... 'autistic'? For the informed individuals who are part of this thread it seems oh-so-obvious that a sapling growing out of a tree indicates 'unflatten', however take a step back and think of someone who has never used the program before nor been part of this post, and what they would think looking at such an icon, or worse, at a tree with what looks like coloured fruit on its branches? None of them say 'unflatten' to me. I suppose that maybe be my own ill-founded view that if you are going to create an icon it should in some way pose what it actually does.

Really it's yet more debilitating abstraction and if the forum 'fanbois' are removed from the equation, then this kind of methodology will be met with a lot of confusion, frustration and criticism from future users and should be avoided at all costs. Can some analogy be proposed that actually refers to what the component is doing....i.e unflatten! A good start point would be to forget the whole 'tree' thing for a while and actually come up with a pictogram which would show an object being 'unflattened' and then apply the whole 'tree' part somehow if it is so important.

Food for thought.

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on March 16, 2013 at 11:21am

But it makes sense. It is not just flatten. It is flatten tree as gh works with data "trees" anyone who reads the book would know this.