Two days ago, I proposed The Offensicon Project, and requested your comments. That phase hasn’t ended; I am still requesting your comments! But from the comments already offered, and from my own testing, I have found some room for improvement in the icon artwork, and made some revisions.

THE COMMENTS

I want to thank the folks who have already offered their opinions. Your suggestions and observations are a great help, and I have tried to address every one of your concerns. Please keep your opinions coming, and don’t be shy about criticizing. I’m trying to improve The Offensicon Project, not fish for praise. (Although I do accept praise graciously.)

And double-thanks to authors who have linked to The Offensicon Project, to draw more voices into the discussion. I mean specifically rzklkng, Bill, Basil, Doug, and Jeff — but to anyone who linked and I didn’t notice, thank you, too.

THE REVISIONS

Here is how I have revised the Offensicon emblems.

	OLD	REVISED
NUDITY
SEX
PROFANITY
YUCKINESS
OTHER

1) HEIGHT The old size was 20 pixels wide by 24 pixels high, which I think was a little too tall for an inline graphic. The new size is 20 pixels square.

2) CORNERS The Offensicons have rounded corners. The old set was antialiased, so that the icons looked good against a white background, but not against a dark background. I have taken away the antialasing at the corners, so the emblems now work equally well against any background.

3) BORDERS Each class of Offensicons has its own color code, which formerly was used for both the artwork and the border. In the new set, I have retained the color-coding in the artwork, but made all the borders dark red.

4) ART Some of the icons did not scale down very well to the small size, so I simplified the artwork to be more usable at 20 pixels square. I have also reduced the number of colors in the palette of each emblem, giving them all a cleaner look.

5) DISCARD In the old set, I had three different icons for sexual content. Now there is only one. Different sorts of sexual activity can be specified in the “alt” text.

Please give me your comments on the revised artwork. It is not “final” by any means, and there are still some further revisions I am considering. (For instance I have not decided whether to make specific icons for “violence” or “drugs,” or whether those should fall under the catch-all “other” category.)

EXAMPLES

Here are some links utilizing the revised Offensicons.

EXAMPLE 1: Those wacky Germans and their erotic Bible calendars .

EXAMPLE 2: See Wizbang’s current photo caption contest .

EXAMPLE 3: Protein Wisdom has Arnold’s Tookie analysis .

THE NEXT STEP: ALPHA TESTING

I still want you to comment on The Offensicon Project even before I take it to Phase Two, but I thought I would tell you what Phase Two will be, so you can make comments about that too, if you have an opinion.

My next step will be to make an “Offensicon Tag Generator,” which will write the HTML for Offensicon-tagged links from a simple input form. Then I will ask for volunteer bloggers and other Web authors to use the Offensicons on their own sites and report how well they are working, and suggest areas of improvement.