On Dec 22, 2007 5:10 AM, Michael Grosberg <preacher_public@...19...> wrote:
bulia byak <buliabyak@...360...> writes: Can you tell me what those reasons were? I don't think I remember you talking about it - not in the mailing list anyway.
from my old mail:
- are too pale and too different in blackness/visual clout - some are barely visible on a LCD (star), some are much more visible, but overall they are much paler and drabber than our current set
- lack meaningful parallelism: it is not coincidental that pen, pencil, and calligraphic pen in our current set are all drawn at the same slant; in tango the pen is way too different in all aspects, breaking the consistency of drawing tools
- lack coordination with our mouse cursors: in our current set, node tool uses this thin triangular black pointer depicted on its icon, and paintbucket cursor is also similar to the icon - this is not the case with proposed icons
- lack a lot of meaningful details that help Inkscape user understand the purpose and operation of the tool: cursor in Text, handles and gradient line in Gradient, both polygon and star in Star tool to suggest it can create both, mnemonic colors of shape tools that correspond to their default colors in newly installed Inkscape.
Also:
Re drabness: please consider that Inkscape is a young upstart application, so it's perfectly adequate for it to use bright, memorable icons. This builds recognizability. And now, when it just started to gain wide popularity, it would be the worst time IMHO to change its appearance so drastically and not necessarily for the good. Adobe Illustrator, in its position, may afford very not-in-your-face icons; we may not yet. Besides, AI's icons are much more consistent and eye-pleasing, even though (and maybe because) they are all grayscale, no color at all. This makes a statement. Tango seems to me like it wants to be too many things at once: it is pale but not uniformly pale, and it's colored but not really making good use of the color.
Take paintbucket for example: our icon is very obvious, descriptive, and blends well with the rest. Tango's paintbucket is simply hard to understand - doesn't look very much like a bucket, and what is that blue thing? Especially considering that people don't normally expect to see a paintbucket tool in a vector app.