The story of how we changed the icon of PVS-Studio

The 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 Java. In addition to this global innovation, the existing analysis mechanisms continue to improve and refine, diagnostic rules are being added. There was another global change that you hardly missed. We changed the icon.

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

Where is the decision? Everything is quite prosaic. The current icon was already old and has not changed for many years. Why not update it with a global version update? On that they decided that by the release of 7.0 you need to come up with something new.

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

By the way, readers who closely follow our publications, as well as those who communicate with us at conferences, may have already noticed some changes in related attributes, for example, unicorns. Now they are more often portrayed, mostly blue T-shirts are worn, and in general their ranks are diversified in order.

Let us return to the question of why it was at all necessary to experiment with geometric shapes, if a unicorn appears in both articles and on stands? 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 would look like an icon.

Some examples you can see below.

Installer window:

Part of the context menu called from Solution Explorer:

It doesn't look good, right? And the smaller the icon, the worse things were. In some Process Hacker, for example, the unicorn looked quite really indecent. By the way, among ourselves we called this icon “banana”, since it is impossible to distinguish this unicorn in the size of 16x16 from the banana of this unicorn.

Therefore, we decided not to experiment with drawing new unicorns specifically for icons, but try to change the existing one (green letters 'PVS'). In fact, we experimented with the unicorn as an icon a few 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 the three-dimensionality) and change colors. We decided to use blue as the main color: they painted some elements on the site, the unicorns used on the site, in articles, handouts and conference stands are dressed in this color shirt.

3 icons were drawn from which to choose.

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

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

The expansion of the color palette introduced a variety, but the icon still looked too boring and simple. It seemed to us that the main reason - strict horizontal / vertical lines, protruding borders between letters. It was decided to start experimenting with them. Several intermediate options are presented below.

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

Regarding the 'V' questions, we no longer had - it fit perfectly (although it was now more like a tick). There were questions about the border between the letters 'P' and 'S', as she didn’t look so elegant, started 'nowhere' and went 'nowhere'. Compared to 'V', the lines of which both began and ended in the corners of the figure, it looked dull.

Here, a colleague ( Paull , hello) expressed the idea that determined the further key area of ​​work (the quote is not literal): “Why do we need this 'superstructure' over the triangle? Let's throw it out, and then the line on the border of blue and green will naturally settle down in a manner similar to 'V'. ”And that was a hit in the apple!

Beautiful, minimalist, the borders are arranged as needed! Began to experiment - it looked great. Satisfied with the result, we even decided to call this prototype something special - 'UltimateTriangle'. So when comparing with others who are nearby, it was immediately clear who is the favorite here. Well, you understand, an unbiased comparison :)

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

Colleagues had a different claim. If the letters 'P' and 'V' can still be seen here, then the 'S' is obviously no longer readable. 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 for solving the problem outlined above, Ekaterina (yeah, Kate_Milovidova , hello to you too :)) slightly changed the geometry of the figure, adding another angle and transforming it from a triangle into ... an elongated and cropped triangle? No matter how it sounds, it looks even more fresh!

Sketch of a new figure:

And so it looked after the transfer to digital format:

The change in 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 the dark line. The result is shown below.

As you can see, the line exacerbated the case. Now the main element that stands out from the rest and focuses attention on itself has become a dark arrow.

But the division of the figure into three clearly separated components solved the problem. Almost the final version looked like this:

I was pleased with the result. Colleagues, too - now they have seen the letters 'PVS' more clearly here (and how do you do it then ?!).

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

Further refinements were associated with a small adjustment of colors and alignment of the distance between the elements - it should not look too big when the image is displayed on a large scale, but the line should not look like a barely noticeable bar on small images - 16x16, for example.

As a result, we stopped at the next option, which was the final one.

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

Installer window:

Part of the context menu called from Solution Explorer:

Appearance of the analysis progress window when switching open windows:

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

Below I present a short path from the old to the new icon:

It seems to be done well, how do you think? By the way, I can't help asking, but do you see the letter 'PVS' in the new icon?

Conclusion

I hope I managed to tell you an interesting story, showing us our way and explaining how we came from the old image to the new. I recommend to consider it better, 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 in the same place, 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 much water has 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