More readable country flags?

Hi there!

New-ish Piwik user here. Absolutely loving everything about it so far. You guys rock!

I had a small suggestion: the little flags that indicate the country of origin are very blurry and hard to read, due to the pseudo-realistic rippling-cloth shading, and the antialiasing of the textures. A lot of countries have similar-looking flags that differ only in subtle ways, e.g. a dark blue stripe as opposed to a black stripe. The shading makes it hard to tell these apart. As a result, you often have to hover your mouse over the icon to figure out what country’s flag you’re actually looking at.

Would it be possible to use a simpler graphic representation of the flags instead? A quick Google image search turns up a slew of free icon sets that seem easier on the eyes. Here are just a few of them:

http://www.webcooltips.com/hundreds-world-flag-icons-free-download.html

We’ll re-evaluate for 2.0. Icon sizes, transparency, etc will be reviewed at that time.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to install replacement icons. We use the standard ISO country codes as the naming scheme.

Oftentimes, “free” icon sets come with strings attached that make them license incompatible with Piwik; or they’re incomplete or out-of-date with respect to geopolitical changes.

Thanks for the quick response! Good point about the license compatibility thing, I didn’t even think of that. I might well take a crack at doing it myself. If I get anywhere with that, I’ll let you guys know!

Hello Otherthings,

Did you have any luck with doing them yourself?

I never did find a good way to redo the flags myself. I dug into it a little bit, but couldn’t find a solution that wasn’t extremely labor-intensive, and ran out of time.

But it appears that someone else did it! The latest version of Piwik has much cleaner flags, which look hand-made at the pixel level. So, to whoever took the time to do that, thank you!

The new flags are now in Piwik 1.9 - enjoy!