[Bf-taskforce25] Icons design

[Andrzej Ambroż]

The development goes fast forward as far as I can see and some problems 
start to loom on the horizon.  Those are from GUI (icons) department and 
ain't As-Much-Important-As-Core-Functions are but have to be discussed at 
some point as well.
Let me name some of them that bothers me the most:

1.SCRIPTABILITY
The GUI will be scriptable, so icons should be.
Calling icons by the script as an item instead of area coordinates could 
solve some problems that are brought up in the next point.

2.ICONS STORAGE
The icon set grows more and more. Right now we have over 300 items and I 
didn't even start thinking about icons for Operators... Current *.png 
matrix is 600x640pix. Space between icons could be reduced to three pixels 
instead of five so that couple of dozens more new icons could be packed in, 
but even though the space will be far too small when bigger icons will be 
introduced into the GUI (32x32 pix). Separate icon sheets aren't very 
elegant solution – I think. They will become a mess very quickly.
More flexible storage system is needed.

Maybe we should consider a zip archive full of separate icon files in 
various size formats? Naming of those files could follow scheme of names of 
internal constant operators / RNA /(...whatever...).
Advantages of such solution are:
1.expandability - more icons for new/custom tools/actions/etc. without 
redesigning the icon sheet(s).
2.Code independent multi-resolution icons. “To have bigger icons or not to 
have?” question wouldn't be asked anymore - user could just call an icon 
and size wouldn't matter actually.
3.calling icons by GUI's py scripts would be way easier (I think).
4.Not to mention about order (in terms of tidiness as well) within the set.

3.COLOUR CODES
The system of colours I choose for the icon set is effect of design 
compromises I had to make for Blender 2,4x icon design. The decision was 
somehow arbitrary and very personal. I still find it rather consistent, 
well thought and pleasant for my eye even though there are some minor 
flaws.
But... it doesn't match Blender's general colour information system which 
isn't strictly consistent itself. Colour of selection is good example: 
icons – gold; GUI – orange, although activated buttons are blue (somehow 
fits icons – those buttons state is modified :D).
Since I know nothing about planned colour system modifications, but we have 
four ways to go:
1.change GUI colour info to fit icons;
2.make it the opposite way;
3.make some small changes on both sides;
4.design everything from scratch.
The third way I've found the most reasonable... (more orange in selected 
items for icons, less orange for GUI elements...).
Besides I would love to get some feedback on the colour itself, because I 
don't own professional display hardware that could be easily calibrated. 
Each of my LCD's displays the icon set in slightly different way and it's 
irritating somehow.

4.TOOLS (OPERATORS)
There are plenty of them AFAIK.
Hundreds?
Thousands?
Making icon for each of them makes me laughing nervously.
What if we had Ops categorized so that we get some kind of families of 
tools (edge modelling tools, vert modelling tools, selection tools, 
whatever tools, etc.)? The categories could be organized in form of a tree 
providing depth-depend diversity.
I propose it because 16x16pix icons are too small to be used for stack of 
hundreds different   yet still very individual pictures. With proposed 
system 16x16pix icons could be made just for main families/branches and 
individual tools would be labelled just with text. For bigger resolutions 
the only problem is amount of icons to design.

5.16x16pix + 32x32pix ICONS = INCOMING ICON FLOOD
32x32pix icons? Yeah! - more space for details etc. The problem is which of 
icons should have their bigger equivalent. Making second whole set of icons 
in higher resolution would be an overkill, so it's important to define 
destination target for them. Tools (operators) definitely should have at 
least two sized icons. Anything else?
I would propose to open possibility of having multi-res icons in general 
(vide point 2.) but postpone official set of them for future releases. I'm 
afraid that the amount of work will surpass me, so will have to find 
volunteer co-workers.
Here's space for community collaboration though – when things get solid 
enough, I plan to make icons visual identity guidelines so people could 
make their own pictures that match the official set. This way making 
individual icons for Operators isn't such insane idea :)



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