My WordPress plugins have been in desperate need of a lick-of-paint when it comes to the images used on them for a while – and by “images”, I mean those used in the WordPress repository.
There are actually 2 you can provide – an avatar and a banner image. I’ll come to the banner in a bit, but I decided that I needed a single source for the avatars, so they all had a matching design.
I found that in Flaticon – they are free to use as long as I attribute them (which I could do in the README). It took me a little while to find relevant icons and to update Github and SVN but, after that was done, my plugins list looked like this…
Not too bad, if you ask me. A nice, consistent look and a lot more professional than what I had before (a musical note on top of a person’s foot representing my Footnotes plugin, anyone?).
But, only a few days later, an issue arose. Someone reached out to me to tell me that the license that Flaticon used was not compatible with WordPress’. I checked myself and, yes, they were correct. Damn.
I reached out to Freeicon but they wouldn’t help.
So, I did what I should have done before, stuck in my hand in my pocket (to an extent – just remember, I’m not making any money from these icons!), went to Fiverr and paid for someone to make me a set of icons (all with a free licence for me to do with them as I wish). They cost around $5 each, so with 13 it wasn’t a small sum by the end, but I think it was worthwhile to have a more professional result in the end.
Here’s the result…
Janki did a fantastic job and if anyone is looking for something similar, I’d highly recommend her services.
Back to the banner. I always struggled to know what do with the banner but, provided one anyway, as, if you didn’t, you’d get a default one, which looked messy. However, they’ve changed the site and, now, if you don’t supply a banner, none is shown. I think it looks a lot better without one…
I also took the time during all of this to update the “tested up to” version in all of the READMEs too.
Now, I guess, I should start actually updating the code as well 😉 But, first, I’m working on something else…
