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 members of the same community the programs were written for, and the site gave them their own page rather than burying the credit in an about box.
Archive notice. Symbian Toys was an independent hobbyist software project for the Symbian Series 60 platform, which Nokia discontinued in 2013. These pages preserve the project's own documentation as it was published. 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 archived gallery.
- Zeth — one piece is evidenced in the archived gallery.
- BrackoNe — two pieces are evidenced in the archived gallery.
The gallery also held the animated and static banner artwork produced for Guardian. The original image files are not reproduced here: they were the artists' work, not the project's, and the archive record establishes who made them rather than granting anyone 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 archived asset record shows 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 are preserved; the artwork is not reproduced. The archive establishes authorship, which is what a credits page is for. 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.