[Bf-committers] UI changes from cycles branch

[Kel M]

Hi,
The only two things I care about are the button shading and the font. I
don't like the idea of removing the button shading, I love the shading, and
I don't think just drawing rounded boxes and passing them off as buttons
looks good. However, I don't feel very strongly about this, as I have been
using Cycles for a while, and only noticed the flat buttons about a week
ago, and can always change it in the User Prefs.
On the font front however, I really don't think you should change the font.
-10 on Droid Sans. Maybe -1 on Mac font, and -0.5 Ubuntu font. I like the
Ubuntu font when it's big, but I just don't think it "belongs" in Blender,
especially at that size. The mac font is just ugly, though that's just my
personal opinion.

Oh, and I love the new Texture icons and the gray subpanel divider boxes!

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 9:29 PM, Brecht Van Lommel <
brechtvanlommel at pandora.be> wrote:

> 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.
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