Joshua Facemyer / Impressus Art wrote:
bulia byak wrote:
On 10/24/07, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote:
Add, as Elisa pointed out to me, there is a wiki page started about this: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/TangoifiedIcons
I'm sorry to spoil the party but I really, really don't like the "proposed icon" column for tools. They:
- 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
I actually agree with this. Having looked at the Tango icons next to the original, I like the original better in many cases, especially for the bolder colors. ...and I'm partial to my paintbucket icon...
Agreed. I personally like the current icons more than the proposed icons if only for the reason that they catch your eyes. I also find that they communicate what the tools do more effectively as well. bulia's examples cover my issues.
- 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
I was also wondering about this. I think it looks better to have the same slant and I like the old pen style better. The new pen style is kind of difficult to determine what it is, unless you know already. In addition, the magnifying glasses aren't all consistent, which is a little odd.
The new calligraphy icon is a step backwards to me. As for the magnifying icons, not only are they not consistent (imho), they also don't have enough contrast and aren't crisp enough by comparison to the current ones.
- 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
This can, of course, be easily remedied, can't it?
Easy remedy provided someone wants to spend the time doing it... and maintaining things too. People tend to want to make changes and not maintain them, which then means the other devs get pulled away from more important issues. Honestly, I'd rather have bulia freed up to continue doing innovative and interesting things in the UI, rather than him having to fudge with icons and such.
- 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.
Makes sense.
Nod.
I think that these problems outweigh the advantages if any, and I just don't see a convincing reason for the change.
I agree with most of what you said readily. However, I think it's important to try to make a unified UI between common apps.
This seems to be the most common argument. But I haven't seen anyone address some major underlying issues here.
When the UI's are all inherently different to begin with, what good does it do to make the icons match? All three mentioned apps (Inkscape, GIMP, & Scribus) have different ideas of what their UI should be and what makes for good usability.
If the tools are "kinda" the same between apps (as in the same in principle, NOT usability), but represented by the same icon as it would be in a suite, is this not more confusing to the end user? Sorry, but the pen tool in inkscape and the pen tool in gimp are not really the same when it comes to usability. I'm not saying that the base functionality of tools themselves are completely different, but I'd personally not want people to associate our pen tool with that of the gimp (no offense, I'm just stating that they're quite different... and inkscape's rocks ;)).
Additionally, Scribus uses QT which has a different "look and feel" altogether than GTK, so there's only so much unification possible no matter what. At that point it just comes across as a "cheap" attempt at a suite.
So I was also wondering, if these things can be remedied, are you against making an icon set change? Are you just opposed to Tango's color scheme / style?
Besides, even if it's not made the default icon set, it's still nice to have as an alternative.
I don't know if bulia would be against it or not. But even if these things could be remedied, the last icon set change was not a notably fantastic or smooth experience. It took a lot of feedback and tweaking to get things to where they are. It was worth the pain in the end, but I don't know that there will be enough flexibility on the tango side to make it worth while for us.
Personally, I wouldn't be against including the tango theme icons in addition to the standard and legacy sets. But I'd like to see a much more complete set before I'd even really put in an "okay" vote for that. In fact, I'd personally also like to see UI created to change icon sets inside inkscape (rather than switching svgs) prior to including another icons set.
-Josh