Caltrain Project Post Mortem

Commissioned project: Caltrain icon for Caltrain program for the Nokia Phone

Company: Kern Computing

Follow your train on your celphone

What went right: The logo turned out cute, easy to see and easy to understand as it is the universal sign for “railway transport”. It brands the program and makes it easy for the user to find it and its general cuteness is friendly and helpful. Creating the logo in Inkscape lowered overhead and kept with the “open aps” feel as Inkscape is a free program. A free open source program to make a logo for another open source program is a win win.  A simple icon stands out among the collection of extra fancy 3d icons usually cluttering up the phone screen and it loads quickly.

Touch the icon, follow your train, never miss it again

What went wrong: Building the logo in Inkscape was difficult and more slow than doing it in a more powerful (And more expensive) program such as Adobe Illustrator. The inability for Inkscape to export gradients well at such a tiny size made creating a web 2.0 style icon difficult. Old fashioned pixel art techniques were used instead of vector gradients for the shine. Alphas in Inkscape are harder to edit than in Illustrator which also slowed the pipeline.

Pipeline: The project was completed entirely online through Gmail and Google chat between myself and my Uncle (John Kern of Kern Computing).  Altering the icon, sending it to California, waiting for a test and having it sent back was slow at times but it worked out well in the end.  Running a family business project across the country through the internet; mix your old school with the new school.