David Christian Berg wrote:
- The diagonal division and the diagonal red line add further visual
complexity.
It distinctively means "none" to me. It's just what Adobe does.
Agreed - it seems to be a universal language for both 'none' and 'not yet set / unset' both in Adobe and Macromedia products. Designers are accustomed to ignoring the visual appearance of a red line and seeing instead its meaning: 'nothing is there'.
Yet here we might run into a not-so-little problem; that of patenting within the UI. Adobe and Macromedia have a long history of suing one another (even though I understand one is about to be bought up by the other) for using similiar interfaces. Investigating Xara, PaintShopPro and other alternatives might be useful. I'm unable to remember off the top of my head how GIMP displays 'unset / none' - but avoiding copying Adobe/Macromedia's slash box might be wise.
I like the example - although the completely blank boxes were confusing to begin with, they soon became intuitively understandable. Questionmarks are a possibility (Adobe Illustrator uses a series of questionmarks for 'unset' or when selecting multiple areas with different stroke/fill settings).
Which raises another nightmare... how to show 'unable to display' when selecting multiple areas...
mC~