(and colour blindess) Re: [Bf-funboard] Object Hierarchy / Visibilty Management

Thorsten Wilms bf-funboard@blender.org
Wed, 3 Dec 2003 18:16:19 +0100


On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 01:58:32AM +1000, Luke Wenke wrote:
> Hi,
> Going through that whole link:
> I like the red diagonal line (though the official "no food", "no smoking",
> etc, signs seem to have the line go from the upper-left to lower-right - the
> opposite to how it is now).

Association with "no ..." signs isn't intended, but is hard to avoid.
The intention is to indicate that there's something disabled, not that 
something is forbidden.
I needed something to stand out in combination with the lock icons. 
I tried different colors, red is best, other colors make it harder 
to recognize.
And in it's current orientation the line goes up (reading direction) and 
makes you fell happy, instead of going down and make you depressive ;-)

Seriously, if no better replacemet can be found, I'm for keeping it 
exactly like is.

> Blue locks are good.
> I don't like how there are basically four shades of grey used in the
> backgrounds. (I know some have a 3d look but I don't think that is
> noticeable enough).

OK, difference between active/empty and active with content is small. 
But I can make out the other states even with squinted eyes.

> For more contrast I suggest that white be used as a background colour.
> The background colours could be this:
> Empty non-visible - white
> Empty visible - light grey
> Occupied non-visible - medium-light or medium grey
> Occupied visible - medium-dark or dark grey

So basicaly I would just have to increase contrast. 

> If layers have sublayers, my suggestion is that the lower-right corned have
> a tiny black circle or square. It could go right in the corner, with no gap
> between the edge.

There are no sublayers with my mockup.

> The active layer could have a little coloured star in the lower-left corner.
> (It could even go over the lower-left border so that it doesn't obscure the
> other things much.

Another icon inside the button is very problematic. There are only so few 
pixels.

> Or there could be a bright coloured border around it...
> (maybe green, so the colour scheme could be red/green/blue.)
> I think those suggestions would make things a lot easier to notice.

I use a border, but I think it shouldn't have too mutch weight.
Bright color can be distracting. And white or black provide maximum 
contrast on bright or dark gray.

> Also, about colour blindness considerations: (people might want to include
> this in the docs)
> This has statistics and simulations of colourblindness:
> http://www.iamcal.com/toys/colors/
> This shows the colour wheel for 3 types of colour blindness:
> http://www.otal.umd.edu/uupractice/color/
> It seems that yellow/cyan/magenta(pink) is probably the best combination
> (which Blender often uses) and red/green/blue is ok. Other possibilities:
> red/yellow/cyan, or red/blue/yellow <- probably the best - yellow could be
> for the active layer)

Thanks for the links!

Best thing is to make sure things work with brightness contrast alone. 
And then, far as I understand, one should keep in mind that either 
pure red or green will be perceived with much less contrast by people 
with 1 of the 2 most often found color vision deficiencies. Blue and yellow 
seem to be rather save (statisticaly).


---
Thorsten