Free time application development is a curious activity. While programming professionally usually means that one is responsible for only a part — smaller or bigger — of the final product, programming outside working hours is different.

Publishing a side project requires completing a lot of different tasks. The creator needs to wear many different hats. Apart from architecting and programming the application, they have to think about the user interface and the user experience, write the documentation, promote the project in the various public channels and more.

All the roles are bound to one person. Every role is important.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. The extra responsibilities bring extra opportunities to learn and to grow — new information to read, new material to study, more experimentation in unknown areas.

One of my favorite “side quests” in my free time programming is icon design. I am not particularly good — although I think I am getting better — but thinking about a concept, iterating over the different ideas in Inkscape and producing the final result is a process that I find quite enjoyable.

Last month, I released my first ever GUI application, Klisi. I wrote some thoughts about that initial release in a previous post.

Of course, Klisi came with its own application icon — one that I designed after I read the relevant section in the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

After many iterations changing the colors, the number of elements, the characters to print and the shapes, this is what I was able to come up with.

This seemed adequate for a while, but I was not completely satisfied. I wanted the icon to be a little more lively, a little more playful with the words. Klisi means “call” in Greek. I thought the name was fitting for a Callgrind profile viewer and generator.

The icon was not yet up to the same standard. The first attempt was good, but the output felt a little dry. It could lean a little more into the name. I wanted to find an item that would elegantly accompany the name. The obvious relation would be some kind of phone. Many “call-related” applications use a telephone handset. But this is quite common and not very playful. I instead opted for something a little more retro.

A rotary dial.

I wanted to keep the λ (lambda) and % characters from the original icon — to maintain the spirit of function call profiling. I thought it would be fun to use the lambda as the rotary phone finger stop. The % character would then be placed in the center. Additionally, the numbers inside the finger holes would provide an additional indication of the number crunching nature of the application.

Et voilà!

What do you think? I believe it can receive some more polishing to provide some more depth to all surfaces, but this is the extent of my skills for now and I am satisfied with the result.