[Bf-committers] UI changes from cycles branch

Brecht Van Lommel brechtvanlommel at pandora.be
Mon Oct 24 03:29:20 CEST 2011


Hi,

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 1:39 AM, Matt Ebb <matt at mke3.net> wrote:
> I'd personally like to hear the rationale for these rather than just saying
> here's the patch. Some of it seems a bit more like a matter of taste too,
> rather than something that's designed for a wide audience, so I'm curious to
> hear the reasoning.

Alright, I already discussed this with a few people, so forgot that it
might need more explanation :)

>> * Remove emboss on areas and regions

The embossing distracts from the buttons and text in the actual
region. There wasn't any embossing around areas (mistakenly mentioned
that), only black lines. It's around regions only, and there it
doesn't seem to help much, because the regions are in a different
color from the main region anyway?

>> * Remove button emboss
>> * More subtle colors and gradients on buttons

For me this helps a lot in making the buttons more readable. Most user
interfaces have only sparsely distributed buttons, but in blender we
have many buttons, and I think at a certain point embossing and
gradients just make it harder to actually read the text in them.

Buttons with more embossing make a clear distinction with e.g. the 3d
view or timeline, but I think they just take away attention too much.
Most user interfaces have most buttons in the same color and nearly
the same color as the background. In Blender this is not the case, and
adding embossing doesn't seem needed.

>> * Black arrows on menu button
>>
> -1, Way too low contrast, there's almost no point in having them there.
> Makes them look like other dark UI widgets like radio buttons, which is not
> good.

For me the arrows are quite visible but they could be made darker
still. I think that if you look at the buttons, you see the arrows,
but if you're scanning over buttons they can be skipped over. I think
this is a good thing, for example in the 3d view header, there's a few
of those in a row. The white arrows distract from the white text/icons
and it's harder to scan for the right button.

>> * Panel header changed look & smaller

The panel header with a single line makes it more difficult to see
where one panel ends and the other begins, so I made the entire header
darker. There is no longer space between the panels when they are
collapsed, but otherwise the header has the same size. They could be
made a bit bigger but don't feel cramped to me, maybe they would on a
bigger screen.

>> * Screen splitting widgets look
>>
> Not a fan of how it is now, but perhaps if it was the dark triangle with a
> hint of the 'gripper' lines blended on top it would work better.

Ok, I can try to add some subtle gripper lines.

>> * Toolbar/properties expand button look

Guess this one was obvious, unconnected (+) buttons are confusing.

>> I'd still like to change the font in trunk, but it seems hard to get
>> an agreement on this. Some tests:
>>
>
> Again, I'd like to hear the rationale - I think the font in trunk right now
> is very good.
>
> If it's to make things smaller and more condensed, be wary of cutting off
> one's nose to spite one's face - you *need* whitespace in design, it's not
> just wasted areas where more can be crammed in.

I don't particularly care about the text being smaller, any gains
there are very minor. I just think the current font is hard to read at
this size, too 'smudgy', and the shapes of words aren't very
distinctive. My impression is that there are fonts that were designed
to work better at this font size.

Thanks,
Brecht.


More information about the Bf-committers mailing list