[Bf-committers] UI changes from cycles branch

[Campbell Barton]

Overall seems ok to me, though some of these details I'm not fussed either way.

dark vs light arrows - no strong opinion here, though I like lower
contrast but agree its too low at least on my monitor.

Matt, agree emboss on buttons could be good but think how its used in
trunk does not communicate anything about the buttons state.
In Agustin Benavidez's reply he mentions about buttons being pressed
being hard to see, While I agree with him (and think we should improve
this),
I don't think you're patch makes this better or worse, in both since
the emboss is on the outside not showing if the button is pressed or
not.

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Thomas Dinges <blender at dingto.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> I fully agree with Brechts changes and give +1 for them as Py UI Module
> Owner and member of the Interface Look team!
>
> I would also not necessarily change the screen splitting widget, I think
> it's way better in the Cycles branch now, compared to trunk.
>
> Removing the white arrows in menus, making them darker, helps indeed a
> lot while scanning over buttons as well.
>
> Regards,
> Thomas
>
> Am 24.10.2011 03:29, schrieb Brecht Van Lommel:
>> 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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>
>
> --
> Thomas Dinges
> Blender Developer, Artist and Musician
>
> www.dingto.org
>
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-- 
- Campbell