This is a small demo of the icons to be used for the new OPU Badge System being released at the reunion. The entire set is nearly complete and progressing much quicker than the old set I was working on. I am pleased so far with the results.
The icons below are all displayed at 64x64 pixels. They were bicubically scaled from their original development size of 800x800 pixels. I reduced the dev resolution to lessen the .psd file size so the release directory isnt too large to work with.
As you can see, the current system is much simpler than the old. Having only two elements (the base denoting rank and the identifyer which denotes purpose) reduces the level of complexity, making the icon easier to distinguish when scaled to their eventual working sizes.
I created all of the icons from scratch. The gradients and shading are all custom and will be included in the release directory so users who choose to develop new icons can simply import the elements into photoshop to maintain continuity. Some of the icons use portions of dingbats I imported. There was no point in spending time making an element from scratch when I had a more refined version of the same thing sitting in my font directory
The icons were made using 8 bit RGB color to make them easy to import into a variety of editing software, again to make later development less cumbersome.
Unfortunately the icons as they are now seriously lose their quality when scaled below 64x64 pixels. I believe this will have to be the point at which the lo-res pixel icons take over badge representation.
Tell me what you think. Revisions will be released after reunion.
Here is a breakdown of the rate at which the icon quality degrades with resolution scaling. The effect is pretty dramatic when below 64x64.