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On my quasi-blog: "Iconography of the PuTTY tools"

The icons used by the PuTTY tool suite; some discussion of the design, the technical constraints, and the progression from hand-drawn to script-generated. Inspired by a user sending me email asking about it recently.

chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtath…

Iconography of the PuTTY tools

www.chiark.greenend.org.uk

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in reply to Simon Tatham

Zeno Rogue
Zeno Rogue
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I think blue is by far the most common color used for display backgrounds if we do not count black/gray/white (which would not be appropriate for this icon). For example, it was used in: Amstrad CPC computers with color monitors; Norton Commander and its descendants (like Midnight Commander that would be likely to be running inside PuTTY); or like half of the famous Windows XP "Bliss" wallpaper.
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in reply to Simon Tatham

Stuart Langridge
Stuart Langridge
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was the black and white recommendation for early windows icons because of high contrast mode, I wonder?
in reply to Stuart Langridge

mal3aby
mal3aby
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@sil The B&W icons were used in Win3.x when dragging the program's icon (ISTR the mouse pointer changed into the B&W version of the icon temporarily for the duration of the drag, but that might not actually be true). Not sure if that happened in Win95 under some circumstances or not.
@Stuart Langridge
in reply to mal3aby

Simon Tatham
Simon Tatham
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@mal3aby @sil I still have a working Win95 virtual machine (I make sure the special backwards-compatible builds of PuTTY still run on it before every release). So I booted it up to see what happens if you drag an icon. The dragged icon is still shown in colour, but made semitransparent by removing half the pixels in a chessboard pattern – effectively halftoning the 1-bit alpha channel.

But of course that's just the _most obvious_ way to drag an icon in Win95. You said "under some circumstances" – I can't rule out there being a weirder situation in which something different happens.

A partial screenshot of a Windows 95 desktop, with its default plain dark cyan background. The user is in the middle of dragging the desktop icon "Set Up The Microsoft Network" to one side. In the top left is the icon and its text in their original location, highlighted in blue to indicate that they're selected. In the bottom right is another copy of the icon and its text, showing the current location they're being dragged to, underneath the mouse pointer. The dragged version of the text is unhighlighted, and the dragged version of the icon has a chequerboard effect in which every other pixel is the cyan desktop background instead of the colour it would be in the icon.
@Stuart Langridge @mal3aby
in reply to Simon Tatham

mal3aby
mal3aby
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@sil Haha, indeed I chose my words carefully - I knew "normal" icon dragging didn't use the B&W icons in 95 but couldn't remember if there were other cases where it did!

Apparently my memory was correct and dragging in 3.x does set the mouse pointer to the B&W icon; here's the "Write" icon being dragged...

@Stuart Langridge
in reply to Simon Tatham

mmu_man
mmu_man
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I wonder how it'd work out with Haiku's HVIF format and Icon-O-Matic…
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Michael Knudsen %n%n%n%n
Michael Knudsen %n%n%n%n
• •

great read!

I don't mean this as something negative, but I always thought the icons were some of the standard stuff that Windows or MSVC provided. I think that shows that your icons fit the design language of Windows very well.

in reply to Michael Knudsen %n%n%n%n

Simon Tatham
Simon Tatham
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@mk I'll take that in the spirit it was meant!

Like calling something "the invisible art", indicating that the sign of it being done well is that it goes unnoticed. (I think I've heard that about film editing, though it's probably been said of more than one thing.)

@Michael Knudsen %n%n%n%n
in reply to Simon Tatham

gaydar jammer
gaydar jammer
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nice! I suppose generating different SVGs changes the linewidth?
And is there a way to see the ugly upscaled bitmaps?
in reply to gaydar jammer

Simon Tatham
Simon Tatham
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@joes the SVG script only generates one version of the SVG, with a fixed line thickness relative to the rest of the image. It's possible that making it a parameter could have uses, but I haven't done that. (Yet.)

If you want to experiment with the icon script yourself, you can clone the PuTTY git repository and run it with a command like "mkicon.py putty_icon 96 output.pam". (Name of icon-drawing function inside the Python script; pixel size; output file name.) The output is in the very simple PAM bitmap format, because I didn't bother to import PIL and make it directly output the PNG I really wanted.

Here's an example of particularly terrible rendering: when the pixel-based script scales up the Pageant icon, the hat looks awful _and_ is in completely the wrong position. Use the SVG version in preference to this!

A rendering of the Pageant icon at 512 × 512 pixel resolution, by a script mostly designed for much smaller pixel sizes. The icon is intended to depict a 1990s-style desktop computer with a wide-brimmed hat perched on top of its monitor at a rakish angle. But the hat is drawn too high, so that it's levitating above the monitor, and also the outline of the top of the hat is jagged and ugly, because the script hasn't done a good job of scaling up.
@gaydar jammer
in reply to Simon Tatham

WOMUMP
WOMUMP
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something that occasionally amused me (or did before generative AI) was to search for "putty icon" and see people's creative interpretations of your original design (although some that tickled me are no longer out there)
The PuTTY icon, of a fat yellow lightning bolt between two blue-screened computers, only all the elements are in a 3D gradienty vector-graphics style, and each of the PCs consists of a flatscreen (still with a MASSIVE stand) next to a thin vertical blade-style system unit, probably from the 'thin client' era.
The PuTTY icon, only in a vector gradient style, with the yellow lightning bolt connecting a dark-grey gradienty PC with a with a thin green screen and rounded corners with some sort of PDA in the same style.
The PuTTY icon, only with a yellow lightning bolt that has gradients and zigzags vertically instead of horizontally, and connects what appear to be two iMac G5s seen from an oblique angle, photographed or rendered photorealistically: thick flatscreens with thick white/silver bezels and a backward-curving stand. (The screens are still blue, though.)
Minimalist interpretation of the PuTTY icon, where a wonky yellow-to-red gradient lightning bolt connects two empty lilac-ish rectangles drawn with a round brush, with the rectangle outlines broken where the lightning bolt is.
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Misty
Misty
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This is a very fun read! Really interesting to see all the little bits of history behind it.

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