C-evo-x
A freeware empire building game.
C-evo-x Icon
The logo and application icon for C-evo is a picture of the Earth in the center
of four stylized compass points. The Windows icon, cevoxp2.ico, only contains
a 32 x 32 pixel version, though it is 32-bit color.
The file name makes me suspect that it dates back to the early days of C-evo, when Windows XP was king. Even then, Microsoft recommended that you provide 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 pixel icons in 4-bit, 8-bit and 32-bit color. Windows Vista added for 256x256 pixel icons to support high-dpi displays. I hate to leave gaps that aren’t filled in, and the single resolution icon is one of those gaps.
In addition to the icon, there’s a high resolution version of the C-evo logo
included in the game’s Graphics\ directory.
The compass points in this version are bigger relative to the Earth than in the icon version, and you can see embossed scenes on each point.
I’m not much of an artist, and my knowledge of design tools like Photoshop and Illustrator is minimal. The best I could do would be to scale the existing 32x32 pixel icon up (but Windows does that automatically) or try to scale the full-sized logo down (but a naieve scaling would look like crap). Neither seemed like a fun task for me, and I’m pretty certain I’d always be unhappy with the results.
So I decided to spend a little money and see if I could hire an artist to create a new icon for C-evo-x. There are a number of sites where you can put your requirements up and ask designers to submit proposals. I tried out DesignCrowd mainly because they clearly listed “Icon Design” as a project type. Their site looked professional and established, and creating my project was straightforward; my only criticism being the relentless calls to spend just a little more money at every turn (get more designs!, attract more designers!, upgrade your project!).
Here’s the brief for my DesignCrowd project:
C-evo is an open source empire building game for Windows. “C-evo-x” is my fork of the project; the “-x” is “extended”, “expanded”, “extreme”, etc. The original author hasn’t updated C-evo in five years, so I’ve started my “C-evo-x” project to update the game. You can see the original game website at http://www.c-evo.org and my project site at https://github.com/donmccaughey/C-evo-x. I’m a good programmer but a terrible artist, so I need professional help to create a new icon for the game. The original icon / logo is a view of the Earth against four stylized compass points (see attached examples). I’d like something that is a clear descendant of the original design. An obvious variation is to rotate the compass points into an “X”. I’m also open to other designs and color palettes.The game runs on Windows, so I need a Windows application .ico file with 16x16, 32x32, 48x48, and 256x256 resolution icons. The best official guide to Windows app icons I could find is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/uxguide/vis-icons . I’d also like a 1024x1024 res transparent PNG for use on the game’s project site.
A week later, I had ten different designs from eight different designers. Of the ten, I liked four of them, but one really stood out. All the artists liked the idea of rotating the compass points into an “X”, but the winner, an1state, picked up on the details from the original high-res C-evo logo and added some nice “Civ” elements to the compass points.
And even better, I have the original Illustrator file for future use, and anistate also gave me a nice SVG version of the logo, which now adorns the sidebar of this site.