500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format (2016)

The problem with vector icons is that they don't really scale as well as people seem to think. Just because you can rasterise it at any size, doesn't mean that the resulting icon makes sense at that size. When icons are really small you usually want a simpler version of the same icon for it to remain recognisable. You can see it clearly in the examples used in the article for the 16x16 icon. Compare the bitmap version (https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/images/apps-images/i...) to…

> [Vector format] means that you only need one file per icon; it doesn’t matter how many sizes you want to render icons at. That's not really true, even with vectors it's good to have different images for different sizes, that add details (for larger sizes) or remove details and increase component sizes (for smaller sizes), so the icons look good at different sizes. You can see in the tape recorder icon the author shows: at larger sizes, it looks…

A resonable icon format would be a vector file plus (at least optionally) 16 and 32px bitmap images. A 16x16 px icon is still common (eg toolbar buttons at desktop resolutions lower than 4K) and as evident by the article there is no way of rasterizing a vector image to 16x16 and preserving anything but a blurry mess. At least not without using a very clever (AI could possibly do it) rasterizer. The 16x16 representation is often completely different from…

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12420763