WWW Icons and Logos

We've created a lot of icons for use in our documents. Feel free to copy and use these icons in your own documents. Note that simply including links to the images on our server inline in your documents puts a load on our server and does not provide you with any real benefits. You can get a compressed tar archive via this ftp link.

Apologies to those who cannot unpack this admittedly UNIX-centric format; I hope to have alternate archives for Mac and PC use soon.

The images are all in GIF format, suitable for use as inline images in html documents.

The non-rectangular images use the GIF transparency extension, so they display correctly against any background color. GIF transparency is supported by Mosaic for X and Macintoshes (MacMosaic 2 or later). These backgrounds will appear as standard XWindows grey, the default background color for Mosaic under X and PCs, on browsers that do not support transparency.

The images are divided into the categories:

Icons

40x40 pixel images for generic services.

Buttons

40x40 pixel images with a raised border, useful for links.

Small Buttons

20x20 pixel versions of the basic buttons, to save time and space.

Logos

General artwork, much of it Rutgers or Network Services specific.

I work under UNIX, using xpaint, by David Koblas, to design the images, the netpbm package, originally by Jef Poskanzer, to set transparency and perform bulk transformations, and xv, by John Bradley, to view the results and tweak the images. I highly recommend all three software packages: they are powerful, flexible, and free! Use the following links to get the latest versions using Archie and FTP. Note that the Archie process may take a minute.

• xpaint
• netpbm
• xv

These images for the most part share an 8 color palette. Using such a limited palette has a number of benefits: the images take up less of the user's color map, and they tend to compress more readily. The primary disadvantage of this approach is that it prevents anti-aliasing (or smoothing) the images; anti-aliasing can make details such as lettering more legible, and makes pixel "jaggies" less objectionable.

I recommend using the GIF transparency extension on the background of non-rectangular images: people will change their background colors, and even NCSA's own Macintosh browser doesn't default to the right shade of grey. My recommended technique is to make the backgrounds the grey used by Mosaic for X and Windows: Red/Green/Blue 191/191/191 or #BFBFBF. Then use the following netpbm commands to make the grey transparent:

giftopnm image.gif | ppmtogif -trans #BFBFBF > image-trans.gif

Thanks to jessica for showing me this technique.

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Document last modified $Date: 1995/04/13 18:26:26 $