The "50%" is my favorite. In my humble opinion we need the black frame for better visability on the different types of Google Maps (Maps, Satellite, Terrain) and 50% to not make the icons to light and thus had to see on the maps background. //Matthias

Do you think it's "valuable" to change our design ? Why would we do it ? just to be different from the Google design (plain color) ?

I am still thinking.... don't know if it's worth our time and effort. Its close from the original design too.

Yes, they are "nicer" bot No, I don't think it's worth it at this point, absolutely to much work.

I like the iPhone one :) , the 50% is also cool, ... the problem is I don't see me recreate the 300 icons.

What would be great : find an meaning to the other colors unused "dark red" and "dark green".

Other icon style :

@Matthias, I made antoehr icon style that I call "Smaller + Colored border + gradient". I like it a lot, so I tried a new color palette and made all 14 colors.

What do you think ?

I agree with the fact that recreating all the icons is a waste of time. The icons are small, they don't need to be smaller. And for me, using gradients or effects behind may be confusing...

I love the new "Smaller + Colored border + gradient", they look great, but, no - it's as you know already hard to design in the icon we have so the thought of making the designable area even smaller is not very good. Also, re-designing all icons, no, again. What is this really going to give us or our users? Will we get more visitors, morE donations if we do this? I don't think so, our icons are pretty "awesome" already! ;-)

The new possible future categorization is something that I support 100% and think we should start working for immediately. I would like to suggest some more changes:

Real Estate -> Administration, Offices and Industry I think make sense.

Tourism -> to the new Dark Green category since lot's of the tourism stuff is quite detailed the added contrast of white on dark green would make them clearer.

Days of the Week -> should be moved to the Numeric part in my opinion. They are not Symbols like all other icons.

What do you think?

//Matthias

I would actually like to see a split of color between Restaurants and Hotels too. When I'm doing my maps you really want them to be different. If you are looking for somewhere to eat you don't want to see lots of Hotels, you understand what I mean? On top these are some of the most used icons we have, all maps with them would look better if they had different colors. //M

Thanks a lot Matthias and Thierry, your feedback is very valuable !

Here is what I think : allright, doing again all the icons takes some time we don't have right now. But : we have some problems with categorization, plus we want to differ from Google maps "official" colors.

Points I want to discuss :

• Categorization : let's start new versions of possible categorization. If Matthias have in mind a possible categorization, copy the "current" one under, and name it "Matthias, 20th of January, 2010".

• Colors : if we introduce a new categorization, it might say we need more colors. And we do so, why not use another color palette. Chapter "Palette comparison". This "new" color palette has 14 colors. Can we find more colors ? I don't think so... Then it means we should have at most 14 categories, 14 colors.

• Shadow : current icons have a gradient shadow (3-4 px). Is it usefull ?

The problem is for people using the Google Maps API can't add a 3D shadow (like the pins from Google). If we strip the shadow, it may be pointless and help people that want to add custom shadows (using API).

• Black Border : current border is black (#424242). I created another possible style for icons "Colored border without shadow" that has same size, but has a colored border, and doesnt have any shadow. It won't be very hard to redesign every icon.

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For Real Estate : I think Estate Agent is Blue=Offices. But Real Estate aka "my houses", or "possible future houses" are places "I can go went I want" = Family&Friends... Well is there any logic here ? :) If not I can't see the Friends&Family category very useful.

Tourism -> to the new Dark Green then where goes Nature ?

Days of the Week in numeric, why not... anyway it's not a very important part of the project : low priority.

Separate Restaurants and Hotels : hmm OK but we only have 14 categories....

I am pretty inspired by the work done by PublicEarth? : http://www.publicearth.com/categories/browse

6 categories cover every kind of place....

Their icon design is also impressive : so much I created a special page with all their icons : http://code.google.com/p/google-maps-icons/wiki/PublicEarthIcons

does anyone know where I can find pin icons of the same colour but in different shades so I can make a choropleth map of my data?