Home
|
What's Here
º More than 100 desktop icons with chess motifs. º A kit for creating chess diagrams, using the icons' figurine designs. º Graphics and wallpapers based on the chess diagrams. What's New
16-Nov-08
Chessicons v4 can now be downloaded as a single zip file from the Icons page. This is a fairly large file, best if you have the latest version of Windows (Vista) or Macintosh (Tiger or later) that makes use of the large icon formats. For visitors whose OSs are older and don't require the larger images, I have put together Chessicons v3.6. This is a much smaller download without the 256x256px images, and it includes the improved versions of all the icons as found in Chessicons v4. 13-Nov-08
The ninth set of large icons, Glasses, is now available. This is the final addition to Chessicons v4, and to finish off, a brand new design. 23-Oct-08
I have uploaded Set 8 of the large icons, Boxes. This is another group that noticeably improves on what was in Version 3.5. 18-Oct-08
The seventh set of large icons, Folders, has been added. 07-Oct-08
The large versions of the Borders icons are now available from the Icons page. 24-Sep-08
The fifth set of large icons, Figurines, can be downloaded. The smaller formats for these icons have been improved as well, with more details shown. 20-Sep-08
The large versions of the Staunton icons are now added. These are the only ones I did not make from scratch, but are based on digital photos of my chess set. 18-Sep-08
Another set of large icons, Shapes, has been added. This includes a few spheres that weren't in the previous version of Chessicons. I created the new 3D shapes using Paint.NET, which made the task far easier, and the final icons are also a huge improvement on what was in Version 3.5. 16-Sep-08
The second set of large icons, Boards2 & Buttons, is now available. This set involves the figurine designs, and enlarging the images of these individual pieces proved to be quite laborious, since to use a graphics program to resize them automatically would generate figures that look either too jagged or too fuzzy. So there was no avoiding some manual redrawing of these figurines, though once the largest version of each piece is drawn, a program can adequately reduce it to the smaller formats. In fact, an unexpected outcome was that when I automatically resized a 256x256px figurine to 48x48px, the result looks slightly better - smoother - than the original 48x48px icon!
11-Sep-08
The first set of large icons, Boards (for both Windows and Mac) has been added to the Icons page. The icon format for Windows has changed significantly since a decade ago, when I first began the project of drawing these tiny chess-related images. The early versions of Chessicons, for Windows 95, comprised images of just 32x32 pixels and 16 colours. The icons of the current version 3.5, for Windows XP, are sized 48x48px and involve truecolor and transparency effects. Windows Vista's new icon format considerably increases the image size to a maximum of 256x256px. Such an image type - not so tiny anymore - requires a great amount of details, making it less practical for non-professionals, like me, to produce good-looking results. Nevertheless, with a few excellent graphical tools, I intend to convert at least some of the chess icons to the Vista variety. These will be released in a number of small packages, rather than as a single set.
What's Near º More Wallpapers |
|
