The story of how we changed the PVS-Studio icon



    Release 7.0 marked a new milestone in the history of the PVS-Studio analyzer - now analysis is available not only for code written in C, C ++, C #, but also for Java. In addition to this global innovation, existing analysis mechanisms continue to improve and refine, and diagnostic rules are added. There was another global change that you hardly missed. We have changed the icon.

    Note . In this article you will not find tricks or tips for developing icons. The purpose of the article is slightly different - to tell a story, and if possible make it interesting.

    Why such a decision? Everything is quite prosaic. The current icon was already old and did not change for many years. Why not upgrade it with a global version upgrade? That's what they decided that for release 7.0you need to come up with something new.

    You probably have a question - how did we come from where we came from the three-dimensional green letters 'PVS'? For a better understanding, you should follow the history of changes, which will be described below.

    By the way, readers who are closely following our publications, as well as those who communicate with us at conferences, could already notice some changes in the accompanying attributes, for example, unicorns. Now they are more often depicted as bipedal, mostly wear blue t-shirts, and indeed their ranks are diversified.

    Let us return to the question of why it was generally necessary to experiment with geometric shapes, if in articles and on stands — a unicorn appears everywhere? Why not use it as an icon?

    Yes, the unicorn is really already strongly associated with PVS-Studio, so before experimenting with the new icon, we checked how the unicorn looked like an icon.

    You can see some examples below.

    Installer Window:



    Part of the context menu invoked from Solution Explorer:



    Doesn’t look very right? And the smaller the icon, the worse things were. In some Process Hacker, for example, a unicorn looked absolutely indecent. By the way, we called this icon “banana” among ourselves, since it is impossible to distinguish this unicorn from 16x16 from a banana.

    Therefore, we decided not to experiment with drawing new unicorns specifically for icons, but to try to change the existing one (green letters 'PVS'). In fact, we already experimented with the unicorn as an icon several years ago. Then the development of the icon was ordered from a professional. The result of the work was simply thrown away.

    Initially, it was decided to make the icon more minimalistic (remove three-dimensionality) and change the colors. They decided to use blue as the main color: they painted some elements on the site, a t-shirt of this color wears the unicorns used on the site, in articles, on handouts and conference stands.

    3 icons were drawn, from which I had to choose.



    The second mock out of the vote immediately dropped out, but between the first and third votes were divided. After a short debate, the first icon was also abandoned - it was too simple.

    The third icon presented, although it looked better against the background of the other two, but still did not satisfy all the desires. There were experiments with changing the distance between letters, the shape of a triangle (from an isosceles to an equilateral), and so on. One of the key points was, perhaps, the rejection of monotony and the expansion of the color palette - the allocation of a separate color for each letter. The first version of such an icon looked as follows.



    The expansion of the color palette brought variety, but the icon still looked too boring and simple. It seemed to us that the main reason is strict horizontal / vertical lines that protrude between the letters. It was decided to start experimenting with them. A few intermediate options are presented below.



    The key decision, which greatly influenced further work, and was also reflected in the final result, was the location of the letter 'V' as follows:



    We had no more questions about the 'V' - it fit perfectly (although it was now more like a checkmark). There were questions about the border between the letters 'P' and 'S', since it did not look so elegant, it started 'nowhere' and went 'nowhere.' Compared to the 'V', whose lines began and ended in the corners of the figure, it looked dull.

    Then a colleague ( Paull , hi) expressed an idea that determined a further key area of ​​work (the quote is not verbatim): “Why do we need this 'superstructure' over a triangle? Let's throw it out, and then the line at the border of blue and green will naturally line up similarly to 'V'. ”And that was a hit in the bullseye!



    Beautiful, minimalistic, the borders are located as you need! They began to experiment - it looked great. Satisfied with the result, we even decided to name this prototype somehow in a special way - 'UltimateTriangle'. So when comparing with others nearby, it was immediately clear who was the favorite here. Well, you understand, an unbiased comparison :)

    However, with more thorough testing, one nuance surfaced (where would it be without them). With a small size, the border between green and blue merged, I wanted to emphasize it somehow.

    My colleagues had another claim. If the letters 'P' and 'V' can still be seen here somehow, then 'S' has clearly ceased to be read. Maybe it could be 'completed', but for this you need to have a very cool imagination.

    So from the triangle we moved on. Developing prototypes to solve the problem identified above, Catherine (yeah, Kate_Milovidova , hello to you too :)) slightly changed the geometry of the figure, adding another corner and turning it from a triangle into ... an elongated and cropped triangle? No matter how it sounds, it looks even fresher!

    A sketch of a new figure:



    And so it looked after being transferred to digital format:



    Changing the geometry clearly benefited, but there was a lack of separation of elements / selection of the 'letter' (for whom). To represent the letter 'S', it was decided to try using a dark line. The result is presented below.



    Apparently, the line exacerbated the matter. Now the main element that stands out from the rest and focuses on itself, has become a dark 'arrow'.

    But dividing the figure into three clearly separated components solved the problem. The almost final version looked like this:



    I was pleased with the result. Colleagues too - now they have seen the letters 'PVS' more clearly (so how do you do that ?!).

    The reaction of Eugene, our CEO, ( EvgeniyRyzhkov , hello to you too :)) at first was something like this: “Great, but where is the 'PVS'?” Surprisingly, after a while he began to see letters here ...

    There were further improvements They are connected with a small color adjustment and alignment of the distance between the elements - it should not look too large when the image is displayed on a large scale, but the line should not look like a barely noticeable strip on small images - 16x16, for example.

    As a result, we settled on the next option, which became the final one.



    If you used PVS-Studio 7.0, you probably already saw this icon yourself, but just in case, I’ll give you some examples of how it looks in different places.

    Installer Window:



    Part of the context menu invoked from Solution Explorer:



    The appearance of the analysis progress window when switching open windows:



    An example of how a new icon is displayed during a search:



    Below is a short path from the old to the new icon:



    It seems to have worked out well, what do you think? By the way, I can’t help but ask, do you see the letters 'PVS' in the new icon?

    Conclusion


    I hope I managed to tell you an interesting story, showing our way and explaining how we came from the old image to the new. To better consider it, I recommend, of course, not in the pictures in the article, but during the analysis of my projects. At the same time, you can evaluate the new download page and request a trial key there if necessary.

    For those who are interested in such stories, I also recommend reading the article (if you suddenly missed it) " How the PVS-Studio project started 10 years ago ." However, since then a lot of water has already flowed (at least we moved to a new office), so we definitely still have something to tell ...



    If you want to share this article with an English-speaking audience, then please use the link to the translation: Sergey Vasiliev. The story of how we changed the PVS-Studio icon

    Only registered users can participate in the survey. Please come in.

    Are the letters 'PVS' read in the new icon?

    • 14.6% Yes, they do. 47
    • 85.3% I don’t see anything ... What angle should I look at? 274

    Also popular now: