I’ve looked around the set of repos at graphviz · GitLab and so far come up empty-handed, so I’m wondering: Are source files available for the Graphviz app.png logo(s)? (I’ve found at least two versions, coming back to that in a second…)
Specific reason I’m asking: I noticed that the logo banner here at the forum is a non-transparent image, and it looks pretty bad in the dark theme:
The icon it’s made with appears to be https://graphviz.org/Resources/app.png which is, similarly, a non-transparent, white-background PNG.
It’s possible to “transparent-ize” PNG files with a background, but the results are usually less-than-perfect. It’s especially hard to do when the image uses things like gradient drop-shadows, as the app.png logo does.
I found a different version of the icon in the old-static-website repo, which I personally feel looks a lot better (it doesn’t have that green nonsense on it), and which initially seemed promising because it actually does have a transparent background.
But, turns out the transparency there is an illusion, it was clearly an after-the-fact background erase that looks OK against light backgrounds, but will look like hot garbage against a dark background:
Long and short, the easiest thing would be to just use a vector source file to create a transparent version of the logo. But that’s assuming such a vector source exists somewhere. Or even a Photoshop/etc. bitmap source file with separated layers.
Icons in this style were first created by Glen Low for the MacOS front end to Graphviz. I think some of the source files like Graphviz.ai (for Adobe Illustrator) are still found in macosx · main · graphviz / graphviz · GitLab
There are some variants of this icon seen in the wild, but I don’t believe anyone in our project designed them.
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Ah, excellent, thank you! So, here’s what I found there.
There is indeed an Adobe Illustrator file (Graphviz.ai), which after conversion by Adobe’s online AI → PDF converter tool became a Graphviz.pdf that’s openable in Inkscape.
It appears to contain the building blocks of the icon, in a somewhat unfinished state. Both of the layers are there (the primary layer, and the underlying one “revealed” by the magnifying glass), but the actual magnifying glass itself and the effect of combining the two layers is not executed. (Also, I’m getting a bad font substitution for whatever font the blue letters should be rendered in.)
There’s also a Graphviz.psd (Photoshop) file, which does contain the fully-executed icon, on a transparent background, at 512×512 pixels which is four times the size (16 times the surface area) of the 128×128 versions I’ve seen so far:
So, just exporting that bitmap file to PNG should provide a transparent version of the icon that’s far higher-resolution than most of what’s in use now (I won’t cry that it sacrifices the green “stuff” above the magnifying glass), and maybe that’s sufficient even though a fully-completed vector version doesn’t seem to be present in a ready-to-go state.
(There’s also a second Illustrator file, Graph.ai, which is something completely different:)
And as soon as the spam nanny decides my reply isn’t spam, it’ll be visible.
Hmm. Looking at Graphviz.psd more, I’m beginning to suspect that there’s no “pure-vector” version of the final logo, because it was executed entirely in Photoshop. Possibly because the magnifying glass is a bitmap image. I can believe Illustrator would’ve been… “reluctant” to do that properly.
The .psd file contains two layers for bitmap-rendered versions of the two sheets in the vector file, which it combines using a mask to create the magnifying-glass effect. Then the magnifying glass itself is inserted on top in another layer. (Well, like 3 layers, when you include the shadow effects and whatnot.)
