[Bf-taskforce25] Icons design

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi Andrzej,

First; check the discussion Matt already started here, it has good 
suggestions:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/IconRedesign

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. 
(check Modo screenie in Matt's paper, icons in right-top corner of 3d 
window).

It could be a good idea to integrate this with the new text drawing 
module, which Diego already picked up to work on; meaning we can rely 
on font size and position hints for proper handling of such icons.

2)
Icons that still work on text-size, like the current 16x16 ones, which 
fit in buttons and menus. For larger buttons (or zoomed in ones) we 
should allow them to go up to 32x32 I guess.

3)
Icons used for toolbars, with more details and information, which 
probably won't work well when scaled down... it can be designed for 
32x32 as default, with half and double size available (or up to 
128x128).

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 
could do, but is quite messy to make. Another idea could be to make a 
special "attention" alpha mask, which we can drawn using OpenGL 
"glPixelTransfer()" on top of the RGBA icon to colorize sections.

Further; 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. :)

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute BV  Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam The Netherlands

On 25 Nov, 2008, at 21:16, Andrzej Ambroż wrote:

> Hi all
> Some time ago I finished second ver. of my icon set for Blender (2.4x
> branch so far). Ton asked me to help with further graphic design of 
> icons
> and teased me with visions of 32x32 pix pictures in customizable 
> toolbars
> an so on...
> So far I've been waiting for some fundamental GUI decisions just to not
> bother developers with unimportant stuff but today I noticed that 
> Elubie
> has moved icons related stuff to 2.5 branch.
>
> I'm really not sure if it's time enough to discuss such subject, but I
> would love to develop the set for 2.5 release and to do my best it 
> seems
> that necessity is to get developers c&c / requests / ideas etc.
>
>
>
> _____________________
> Andrzej Ambroż
> mob.:   505 495907
> e-mail: ambroz at list.pl
> g-g: 6042088
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