Icons for mobile phones to access Scriptures easily

Why use icons to access Scripture on mobile phones? Simply because it is much easier for new readers, illiterates or new Christians. It is like a game, "Let me see what I get if I click on this icon!" It can lead to text, audio or video and means that users do not have to remember books, chapters and verses. With just four clicks hundreds of Bible stories can be accessed.

A website that indicates one way of doing this is http://sliss.info, but other ways will undoubtedly be developed.

Almost all the icons provided here have been created from free Bible illustrations that are copyright © Sweet Publishing and are made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This means anyone is free to redistribute, adapt, and use these illustrations (and these derived icons) in your own work, provided that you:

• Attribute the illustrations to Sweet Publishing with a link, where possible, to http://sweetpublishing.com, and
• Release any derivative works (what you create with them) under the same license.

This Readme file hereby gives the appropriate attribution to Sweet Publishing and indicates that these sets of icons are made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Please be sure you understand and are willing to abide by the terms of this license before using these icons. For more information on Creative commons, see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There is a copyright image included with each set of icons; this may help users to fulfil the copyright requirements.

Any icons that are not derived from the Sweet illustrations have a filename ending with "#".

There are four levels of icons:

• Level 3 -- one or more icons for a specific biblical story/module
• Level 2 -- one or more icons for each group of stories (the filenames begin with "00-" and are mostly complete except for most epistles), e.g. Creation & Adam.
• Level 1 -- one or more icons for each major chunk of the Bible (these begin with "000-" and cover the complete Bible, see later.)
• Level 0 -- Several icons beginning with "000-00" one of which is used to trigger the whole process of story/module selection.

The idea is that:

• The user first of all clicks the "Level 0" icon, which leads to the display of up to 9 "Level 1" icons (see later).
• Clicking a "Level" 1 icon leads to a set of "Level 2" icons, each of which represents a group of stories or modules, e.g. Creation & Adam, Noah & Babel, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph.
• Clicking on a "Level 2" icon displays a set of "Level 3" icons for individual stories or modules.
• Clicking on a "Level 3" icon leads directly to a story or module. In this way, four clicks can reach any story or module, whether text, audio or video,  without any need to remember books, chapters and verses.

I worked with an original set of 3,345 Sweet images, but only used about one third of them. For example, for the story of Daniel in the lions' den, there were 14 images, but only 3 were used to create a choice of icons, only one of which will be needed to open the story. Of the 1100 resulting icons, some are duplicates for different books or different levels.

The original pictures were cropped to a square shape, sometimes focussing on a small part of the image in order to select a part that would be a better icon.

The beginning of the filenames of the "Level 3" icons remain the same as the original Sweet images: book number, book abbreviation, chapter number and an additional number. Please bear in mind that the additional number may not indicate the order in which the story/module appears within the chapter.

The icons are being distributed in the PNG format, but all the initial work was done using the JPEG format.

Because the icons do not have a border, it may be better if they are set against a non-white background colour that is not commonly used in the icons. A light mauve might be a good option.

There are some important passages for which no images were available, for example:
    Gen 14
    Exo 17-18
    Ezra 1-6 (Rebuilding the temple)
    Neh 8-10
    Luke 12-14
    Luke 16 (rich man & Lazarus)

The nine levels chosen for Level 1 are:
1) Genesis
2) Exodus to Joshua
3) Judges to first part of 1Samuel
4) First 3 kings of Israel, and their writings
5) Divided kingdom to the start of the second exile, including Isaiah & Jeremiah
6) The exile and the return, including Ezekiel & minor prophets as appropriate
7) Gospels
8) Acts of the apostles
9) Epistles & Revelation

Pros & cons of this approach of converting images to icons:
Pros:
    Almost all the icons are the same style.
    There are a large number (1100) of icons.
    Easy conversion to whatever size or format is required
Cons:
    Too much detail in most images for really good icons.
    Images are not available for all biblical stories or modules.

Anyone can send me freely-distributable icons for inclusion in later releases of the icon set - the first set is marked as v1 (version 1). The icons should be square, at least 512 pixels wide, though 256 pixels square would also be useful. Preferred formats would be JPEG or PNG, but send other formats if that is what you have.

[Note: This file contains a mixture of British and US spellings.]

Geoffrey
aweeba.0@gmail.com