Adding new art to Pachli

[mileskrell]

I'd love to have some Pachli-specific art, both to give Pachli a more distinct visual identity and to generally make it feel more fun.

The art is connected to the broader topic of what Pachli's overall feel should be (playful? modern? retro?) and how we can update the UI to reflect that. But talking about everything in one discussion could be difficult, so we may want to focus on the art in this discussion and use a separate discussion to talk about details of updating the rest of the UI. My primary goal for this discussion is for us to come up with a description of the artwork we want that we can then provide to an artist.

General theme of the art

We say this about the current logo:

It’s adorable, huh. Obviously, it’s a capital letter P, for “Pachli”.

Seeing the obvious similarity with a left-ward facing elephant’s head, ears, and trunk sold me on the idea.

Mathematicians might get a small kick out of the idea that alphabetically, ℙ is close to ℚ, and ℚ denotes the rationals. “Close to the rationals” seems like an apt description for much of social media.

...

The colour scheme is inspired by the Swiss travel posters of yore, featuring stylised figures skiing down mountains, trains carving through valleys and up those same mountains.

Try as I might, I haven't been able to see the "obvious similarity with a left-ward facing elephant’s head, ears, and trunk" in the current logo. I could very well be in the minority here, but I expect I won't be the only person who sees the logo and doesn't get it. Referencing https://joinmastodon.org/apps, I'm inspired by the elephant-ness of Focus's logo; I think it would help if we took our P and added modifications such as a curved trunk and an eye to make it more clearly elephant-like.

I like the "close to the rationals" joke, but it might be hard to keep the logo looking like a ℙ while making the elephant resemblance more obvious.

I'm a fan of anthropomorphic animal logos, and I love Mastodon's frequent use of multiple anthro elephants in the same image (examples: welcome, preview, friends, this whole video). The interactivity between the characters fits really well with Mastodon being a social network.

I know very little German; are words with the -li suffix spelled the same in the singular and the plural? If so, we have the opportunity to interpret "Pachli" as plural within the context of the art, meaning "multiple pachyderms". We could have an elephant as the central mascot that we use in the logo, but feature more "pachli" (rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, tapirs) throughout the app.

Whether we have various pachyderms, or just elephants, or just one elephant, I definitely want to lean more into the Swiss travel theme. Pachyderms skiing, sailing, riding the train or sharing a warm meal together, snowy mountains, lakes, etc. If we kept the Swiss travel theme throughout most/all of our art, it would be a great way to differentiate our elephant(s) from all the other elephants running around Mastodon apps 🐘

Places in Pachli where we could use new art

Non-exhaustive list:

• logo / app icon
• notification icon
• the about page
• error pages
• this collection is empty pages. We could have an "empty collection" image specific to each kind of empty collection, e.g. favorites, bookmarks, direct messages, followed tags, lists, drafts, etc. I'm inspired by e.g. the variations on Konqi: we could have an elephant peering into an empty mailbox, holding a pencil, etc.
• as the background of the header in the main activity. This seems like a great place for a splash of color, similar to a browser theme.
• as the background of the navigation drawer header, instead of showing the user's header picture
• in any large empty space not mentioned above

[mileskrell]

I'd love to have a full-screen login screen background like this one in mastodon-android: