Hey there GarryP and a.l.e.,
A pleasure to meet you and thank you reviewing the work!
A few responses:
1. It's usually best to avoid text in an icon. For the first part, it's language specific and some people may not be able to understand it (for instance, they may not even have those letters in their alphabet). For the second part, at small sizes it becomes unreadable. And, for the third part, it's just generally not done. One or two letters are sometimes okay, e.g. Qt/Adobe/etc, but it's usually best to avoid text.
I generally agree with you in this regard. However, in order to make it feel more like a system icon, I actually modeled the design after the Pages app, which does indeed have text. If it’s good enough for Apple to have on Apple icons, I figure I’d give it a shot. Also, the dominant visibility of the icon is in the tray, where the text is minimally distracting. Attached is a side by side of the Scribus and the Pages icon.
2. If the Scribus icon - and therefore logo - were to be changed I'd (personally) prefer to get away from using a fountain pen. While a pen does have connotations of "writing a book", Scribus can do way more than that and it looks a bit archaic to me.
Very interesting! And very good to know. I didn’t expect a movement away from the fountain pen! It feels very embedded into the brand identity of the Scribus product. Hmmm…that gives me something to think about for the next version.
3. The icon needs to work on all OSes and not just OSX. Have you checked any other guidelines? It also needs to be scalable to look nice when used very small in taskbars, window headers, etc.
I did know it would need to work on all OSes, though I didn’t check the guidelines. I understand it needs to be scalable, but if people generally like the direction of one icon, I can then move forward with an overarching direction that fits across all sizes and platforms. To submit a completed icon in all those directions and have them be dismissed(i.e.-for using the fountain pen) poses quite a bit of wasted time on my part. If indeed I hit upon an icon that people are digging, then I can match it to the style of Windows, OS X, Ubuntu, etc.
4. I don't think that the Scribus team has any plans to change the logo/icon since they've recently got an updated splash screen done by an artist. It would be bad form to just drop it after the work was done but you never know with these things.
Ah, hm. that is good to know. Well, it was a fun exercise for me.
Welcome to the forum and I hope to see more of your work.
Thank you for your time and kindness.