Search:

Yeah, that looks a lot better!

What you're doing now looks fine, so long as it is easy for you to understand. If another organization seems more logical to you, then I'd do that.

Yeah, all the...

You've got it partly. Now, think about
private ImageIcon icon;

You said

which makes sense, but think about this: though each piece has a different ImageIcon, EVERY piece has one. If every...

One suggestion I have: instead of defining x, y, icon, and placeHolder in the Pawn class, do it in the Piece class. Every Piece you make is going to have these fields, and it's redundant to redefine...