Dear Inkscape developers. The current fill and stroke dialog is a big dialog that takes up 1/4 of my screen and has lots dirrerent of stuff in it. I'll try explain some of it's problems trough a short user case.
--- Joakim is a graphic designer. He makes a lot of illustrations for different clients and is under a constant time pressure. He is currently working on a project where the AD has decided that they will use flat colors and stokes of varying width.
1. Joakim has the fill and stoke dialog up most of the time. It is space consuming and he has to move it constantly or hide it in order to see his artwork. 2. He has to do a huge amount of clicks because he moves between fill style and fill color all the time. 3. He is working in RBG color space, but has the ability to choose CMYK, even if the document is not in that color space. This confuses him. 4. He do not use dash pattern at all for this project. This only takes up space for him. 5. The markers are hard to overview (this is not really important for Joakim right now, but it might be in his next project). ---
I have thought about these problems for a while and come up with a quick mockup with some ideas. http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/temp/new_dialogs_mockup.png
What I have done in this mockup is: - Splitted up the current dialog into smaller dialogs for better customization to suit an artists current workflow.
- The font size is set to small to make the dialogs a bit narrower. - All dialogs are equally wide to make them easy to line up. - If the document is in the cmyk color space, it only shows the cmyk color settings. - I guessed most people uses the stroke width more than the other settings in this dialog and put the more rarely used options in an expander. - The markers are in their own dialog as well, and structured in a way that makes them easier to overlook. Names could be displayed when the mouse hoover over a marker.
BTW. I know this looks a lot like Adobe Illustrator. And yes, I am very accustomed to the interface of that program, and am a bit inspired by it. But hopefully this can spur some discussion on how to better handle the color and stroke dialog/dialogs
- Andreas Nilsson