Icon for iPhone Application (already live)

Prowl

We’re a software development company working on iPhone and Mac applications. Our current live project is Prowl, which extends the Growl program for Mac (and Windows), which allows generic notifications to be delivered to the iPhone.

Prowl is marketed towards the advanced users, but a significant amount of less technical users have picked it up as well. Prowl’s generic market is the users of Growl, but also more technical users who have picked up the API for scripting or writing their own plugins.

For the post part, users of Prowl will be anybody from a wide range of expectations; Growl is a widely-adopted application that is used within MANY other applications.

Since Prowl is based largely on Growl <http://growl.info>, an icon similar to Growl’s is of course the goal. The current icon—a plain, boring cat, see <http://prowl.weks.net> —was something quick to get it out there.

One idea is something “catty”—the Prowl/Growl nature suggests it it, but I’m open to different takes on it. For example, Growl’s logo is a claw, though it’s quite outdated and ugly these days, but you can avoid cattyness altogether if you've got a good idea. Feel free to drop the cat idea entirely if you think you can pull it off.

An icon that shows off what Prowl does, instead of a cat nature (at least directly) are also acceptable and encouraged. No envelopes though, Prowl isn't an email service. ;)

iPhone logos have a mask auto-applied by the OS to generate the “gloss” and rounded-rectangle effect. This is an optional thing; we can disable it if it gets in the way of the design, but the rounded-rectangle is a requirement.

The icon needs to look good at 512x512 and 57x57. The former is displayed in the iTunes store, and the latter is displayed on the home screen. A 29x29 version should look recognizable, but clarity isn’t at all important, just recognizability. The 29x29 version is the one used in the ’Settings’ application for identifying the program.