[Bf-taskforce25] icons for 2.5 BF

[Andrzej Ambroż]

-----A-----
Ton wrote:
> Technically, the least thing I know is that we need two or three
> distinct sets of icons.
>
> 1)
> The lowest level - and quite limited - set should be treatable like
> text; meaning only an alpha plane (or B&W) which allows our Theme
> drawing code to draw them black or white, or colored. This will be for
> arrows, dots, and all kinds of mostly button-level decorations or small
> WM widgets. Also think of slider handles, rounded corners, etc.
> Optionally you can draw them even with (soft)drop shadows or embossed.

Do You think about such so far gone customisation? Are You really sure that 
there's need for it?
Matt suggested once that this level of GUI could be hardcoded and drawn by 
OGL.

-----B-----
Ton wrote:
> I really like Matt's suggestion to use color as an additional
> information layer, and not per icon, or to quote Matt: "colour is used
> to communicate on another level of visual language". The tango series
> of icons uses color as a property per icon, which quickly looks messy
> and chaotic. Instead, a design can be made which allows a certain part
> of an icon to get color, based on what we want to communicate, fitting
> with other visual color clues as defined in Theme.
[...]
> I'm not sure how to technically achieve that... in theory a colormap
> special "attention" alpha mask, which we can drawn using OpenGL
> "glPixelTransfer()" on top of the RGBA icon to colorize sections.

My first though was: it will be good for reducing icon number, but 
personally don't find Automatically-Colour-An-Icon-By-Context technique 
really useful.
First of all colour is just one layer of info and I don't think that there 
will be many icons that would change only their colour with different 
context.
It could work for selected/active state, but in my opinion it's way 
economic to make proper design of a big set of icons with custom colour for 
every item, than making sophisticated automatic system that will colour 
just a few pictures.

Ton wrote:
> The tango series of icons uses color as a property per icon, which 
quickly looks messy
> and chaotic.

Tango's messy cause it doesn't use colour codes at all, at last not the way 
that it should have place in such interface that Blender has (or will 
have).
I tried to incorporate some colour in my icon set proposal, and think it 
works well within current GUI:
gold for selection (activity);
blue for modification/action;
red for material related stuff.
Notice that colour's used only for emphasise context – for ex.: we've got 
slightly transparent sphere  with complex lighting as a Shader icon and a 
checker as a Texture icon – both of them are red. Those icons are unique – 
we doesn't have them with other colour. Moreover the Material icon is a 
mixture of both previously mentioned items – a sphere covered with 
red'n'white checker texture and lit in a complex way.
Most of icons are unique...
But that's just an opinion of a guy that has no idea of what future will 
bring :)

-----C-----
Ton wrote:
> afaik you've created the icons in Inkscape svg right? That's
> cool, but I don't think we should add direct svg rendering code in
> Blender. A system using multiple resolutions of icons and interpolating
> them can work very well too. But, this is something our icon/font
> department can look into. :)

Vector graphic is great when you have to make load of tweaks and still have 
full control over the shape, whole colour areas, colour bleeding, blurs 
etc. without havin' to fiddle with pixels one by one – that was the reason 
I used Inkscape. Just a specific tool.
The set I made is not scalable at the moment. It was designed for 16x16pix 
space per icon and doesn't look good in higher resolutions.


_____________________
Andrzej Ambro¿
mob.:   505 495907
e-mail: ambroz at list.pl
g-g: 6042088