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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 12:55 pm and is filed under IBM Lotus Notes, Webdesign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
BizzyBee’s BizzyThoughts
Think Outside The Hive - About Notes and Web
180 action bar icons in 25 categories
UPDATE 1: the icons are now bundled in a Notes database. UPDATE 2: this is a reference card showing all the icons.
A while ago I was looking for pretty icons to use in my Notes action bars. I found the as excellent as cheap (0€/0$) Famfamfam icons from Mark James (apparently Famfamfam is a man).
While this library is of unknown quality, to me it has 2 limitations to make them usable in Notes:
- The icons are in png format (not supported by Notes Designer) instead of gifs.
- The library has 1000 icons, not all of them evenly useful. It makes it hard to find the right icon for your needs.
That’s why I decided to make a selection of the icons that appear the most useful to me and put them into different categories. Then I converted them to gifs while respecting the original transparency of the pngs.
This is an example of how they look like in a form:
Here you can download the 180 action bar icons for Lotus Notes I selected (each category is a folder in the zipfile).
Doing the selection, deciding on the categories and converting the gifs was a lot of work, but I believe it can be an important timesaver, because it are often the same kind of action buttons we face in our applications.
These are the categories I came up with:
- accept
- add/new
- attach
- cancel/decline
- close/exit
- config
- copy
- delete
- edit
- export/files
- find/search
- forward/send
- informative
- link
- lock
- move
- preview
- refresh
- response docs
- run agent
- save
- send back
- status
- various
The selection of icons and categories are my personal choice and are therefor discussable, so feel free to comment. If you think it is interesting, I could also bundle them in a Notes database, but for now I don’t see the added value of this.
Also, if you need more icons (this is the basis set), you can always find them on the original Famfamfam site, but you’ll have to convert the png’s yourself.
All credits go to Mark, the owner of the site. I tried to contact the guy to ask him if I’m allowed to bundle his icons this way, but he didn’t answer, so, Mark, if you ever see this post, please see it as an extra way of spreading your beautiful library.
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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October 25th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
You’re download link does not work. It just says “Made it in”.
Using FF 2.0.0.8
October 25th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Thank you for warning me!
Should be fixed now, this was an issue with the download counter. Can you try again please and give some feedback? (might be possible you’ll need to clear your browser cache)
October 26th, 2007 at 7:43 am
It’s working now. Thanks
November 7th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Thank you! I’ve seen Famfamfam’s work and love it. Dealing with the png to gif conversion was just too much of a time waster for me so I tend not to use his designs. You’ve rescued me!
If you can, describe the workflow you used to make the conversion - what tools did you use and were you using canned scripts/processes in the tool, did you write your own processing methods, or…
Thanks again.
FWIW, the site seems to indicate that the icons are for free with no restrictions. Most graphics sites tend to explicitly describe restrictions so I think what you did was well within allowed limits (IANAL)
Doug
November 8th, 2007 at 12:32 am
Hi Doug,
The workflow…
1) Select the icons I want to include
2) Think about the categories and create folders accordingly
3) Put the png icons in the folders
4) Open every single png and save it as a gif with (surprise!) Microsoft PhotoEditor. This seemed to be the only application that uses a transparent color that isn’t part of the png to replace the transparency in the png.
So, a lot of manual work was needed…
About the restrictions: this is what I found on famfamfam: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. This means you may use it for any purpose, and make any changes you like. All I ask is that you include a link back to this page in your credits.
This is what I did too, and maybe this is the only restriction I’d like to see myself for this set: let people know you got it from here
November 22nd, 2007 at 3:14 pm
[…] Remember the 180 action bar icons in 25 categories? […]
November 28th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
[…] 180 action bar icons in 25 categories […]
November 29th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Hi, my name is disman-kl, i like your site and i ll be back
December 12th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Thanx for the Icons? How do you Convert the PNG-Files from FamFam into gif? Do you have a Tool for this?
December 12th, 2007 at 11:50 am
Hi glod,
I described the workflow in comment nr.5 of this post, you’ll see it’s not magic :-). I use MS PhotoEditor for it, but recently I also started exploring the well-known icon editor from Axialis. It can also do such conversion. Also notice that there’s new stuff added to this, like a reference card and an icondatabase. See “update” section on top of the post.