A Bug’s Life

A while ago (a year?!), I made this cute little bug graphic for Nemiver, a C/C++ debugger for GNOME.

Nemiver has since changed icons. More recently, Shirley pointed out to me that my bug had been used on a Mac site! 😮 (Of all things!) Heh. I only posted the graphic on the Nemiver mailing list, so I was really curious how the author of the post on the Mac site, Tanya Palta, managed to find my graphic. I’m guessing it was a Google Images search for “dead bug”. 🙂 I’m actually rather flattered that my graphic was picked for this post, but it’s worth mentioning that the license wasn’t followed – which is par for the course with the Internet. The image and it’s source was (and remains) released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License (It’s a mouthful, but it’s pretty simple).

The bug originally started with this:

I remember Jesse commenting that it looked like a barbeque. Hah… so it did! 🙂 I went through lots of different iterations:

And ended up with the graphic at the top of this post. I also tried simplifying it and making the eyes bigger to support lower resolutions, but I didn’t really put any effort into fitting it within the Tango guidelines.

Anyway, that’s this bug’s life story.

All images and SVG source available in zip file (dead_bug.zip – 330KB) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Images created in Inkscape, an excellent opensource vector art program.