Artworks

The Artworks page existed to credit the people who made Symbian Toys look like anything at all. The software was written by one developer; the icons, splash screens, banners and theme work came from community members who were credited together rather than buried in an about box.

Project notice. Symbian Toys was an independent hobbyist software project for the Symbian Series 60 platform, which Nokia discontinued in 2013. These pages contain the project's documentation. The software is no longer distributed here, and no support was ever offered for it. Device and platform names appear for identification only; the project was never affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any device manufacturer.

The artists

Four contributors were credited by the handles they used:

• P@sco — credited on the release announcement for SISXplorer 1.1 for providing all the graphics, and again on the product page itself with particular thanks for having taken care of the graphical side of the program.
• DVP — three pieces from this contributor are evidenced in the gallery credits.
• Zeth — one piece is evidenced in the gallery credits.
• BrackoNe — two pieces are evidenced in the gallery credits.

The gallery also held the animated and static banner artwork produced for Guardian. The image files remain the artists' work, not the project's. The credits establish who made them without granting a licence to redistribute them.

Why a credits page

Custom theming was one of the things people actually did with a Series 60 handset, and a small economy of skill grew up around it: artists who could work within the platform's bitmap and icon formats, at the small sizes those screens demanded, and who traded work through the same forums where the software circulated. Several of the tools published on this site — SISXplorer's theme extraction most obviously — existed because that community existed.

The forums where much of this happened are listed on the community links page. Most of them are gone now too.

What theming involved

A Series 60 theme was not a colour setting. It was a package of bitmaps and, on later releases, scalable icons, covering the idle screen, the menu grid, the soft-key bar, list highlights, battery and signal indicators, dialogue frames and dozens of individual application icons — every one of which had to work at a screen resolution measured in a couple of hundred pixels and on a display with a narrow colour range. Getting an icon to read clearly at 42 pixels square is a genuine discipline, and it is closer to type design than to illustration.

The artwork was packed into container formats the platform understood but ordinary desktop tools did not: multi-bitmap MBM files for raster assets, and MIF files carrying scalable icons on the later releases. That is precisely why SISXplorer shipped viewers for both. An artist who wanted to study how an existing theme achieved an effect needed a way to open it, and before tools like this the answer was to guess.

Banners and site graphics

Beyond the software itself, the asset credits show a set of banner images made for individual products — separate banners for Guardian, FlashSMS, UnlockMe!, SISXplorer, NaviFirm+ and IconHider — along with animated and static versions of a Guardian bar graphic and the site's own header. For a project that shipped no marketing of any kind, that is a reasonable amount of visual identity, and none of it was made by the person writing the code.

A note on reproduction

The credits remain; the artwork is not included. The credits establish authorship. It does not establish that anyone else may republish the images, and the artists were credited by handle rather than by name, which makes it neither possible nor appropriate to seek permission on their behalf now.