Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

A forum for research and development of the user interface of FreeCAD
Forum rules
Be nice to others! Respect the FreeCAD code of conduct!
Post Reply
User avatar
agryson
Posts: 463
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2016 8:30 am
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact:

Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by agryson »

Phew! ~190 icons later, sketcher is done. Sorry about the MEGA post, but at least everything is in here.

Old on left, new on right, 16,24,32 and 64 px on light, gray and dark backgrounds. Not included here are the small xpm icons used in the viewer, but these are equivalent to the 16px version with no alpha.
spritesheet_A.png
spritesheet_A.png (630.57 KiB) Viewed 2941 times
spritesheet_B.png
spritesheet_B.png (577.54 KiB) Viewed 2941 times
spritesheet_C.png
spritesheet_C.png (827.36 KiB) Viewed 2941 times
spritesheet_D.png
spritesheet_D.png (701.61 KiB) Viewed 2941 times
spritesheet_E.png
spritesheet_E.png (634.56 KiB) Viewed 2941 times
spritesheet_F.png
spritesheet_F.png (175.38 KiB) Viewed 2941 times
Feedback and comments welcome, I intend on submitting a pull request this weekend provided nothing major comes up.
Edit: typos
User avatar
agryson
Posts: 463
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2016 8:30 am
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact:

Re: Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by agryson »

Note: I have no idea what happened with those ellipses, I think it's my spritesheet script - the actual .svg icons and my build don't show any issues.
triplus
Veteran
Posts: 9471
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:45 pm

Re: Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by triplus »

1.png
1.png (31.76 KiB) Viewed 2930 times
This will likely result in the same way on my toolbar as the Draft Clone example we talked about in the past.
2.png
2.png (16.2 KiB) Viewed 2930 times
Old one has much better detail at small size.
3.png
3.png (11.53 KiB) Viewed 2930 times
You'll likely need to find a better solution for the text in the future. As current solution surely can't be part of any official guidelines. If it will be i hope designers will ignore it. ;)

Beyond that looking good.
User avatar
agryson
Posts: 463
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2016 8:30 am
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact:

Re: Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by agryson »

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, out of the 190 icons there were one or two that had a lot of detail and I was presented with a trade-off:
A: Keep the level of detail but lose any ability to ensure value contrast (thus incompatible with themes and not future-proof)
B: Ensure contrast but end up with very 'fat' and honestly not very pretty icons.

I chose B since I'll always give visibility (especially for color-blind users) priority over aesthetics. I hope that we can review these overly dense icons in stage 2 to reduce their complexity and resolve this issue once and for all. I'm very open to suggestions on this front! Especially for "merge sketches" and "mirror sketch".as well as the 4 or 5 icons showing multiple constraints...
triplus wrote:You'll likely need to find a better solution for the text in the future. As current solution surely can't be part of any official guidelines. If it will be i hope designers will ignore it. ;)
As we've also discussed before, icons shouldn't contain text at all (so any guidelines that explain how to treat it should rightly be ignored)!

Given that we are still in stage 1 though, I am obliged to keep the text in this round (but again I opted for contrast - if you had included the dark background in your screencaps you would see why.)
User avatar
DeepSOIC
Veteran
Posts: 7896
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2014 12:45 am
Location: used to be Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Re: Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by DeepSOIC »

Man, that was a few icons to update!
Looking through the list, it seems there are quite a few icons that are not actually used.
User avatar
agryson
Posts: 463
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2016 8:30 am
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact:

Re: Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by agryson »

DeepSOIC wrote:Man, that was a few icons to update!
Looking through the list, it seems there are quite a few icons that are not actually used.
Tell me about it! There's a lot I think could be removed - but I didn't want to mix tasks.

Would there be a way to programmatically find and prune unused icons? At least moving them into an archive somewhere in case we wanted to use them again in the future.
cox
Posts: 971
Joined: Wed Nov 26, 2014 11:37 pm

Re: Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by cox »

Looking good, @agryson

One small observation, it looks that when some of the points/vertex symbols have gotten larger they in some icons becomes overly dominating, and even in some instances touches each-other.

For later maybe in round 2:
These points/vertexes are also differing in size throughput the icons, since these graphical representations are scattered around the icons all around FreeCAD, it might be a good idea to standardise some sizes?
Spectacle.F16652.png
Spectacle.F16652.png (25.28 KiB) Viewed 2908 times
Spectacle.D16652.png
Spectacle.D16652.png (18.48 KiB) Viewed 2908 times
Need help? Feel free to ask, but please read the guidelines first
User avatar
agryson
Posts: 463
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2016 8:30 am
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact:

Re: Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by agryson »

cox wrote:These points/vertexes are also differing in size throughput the icons, since these graphical representations are scattered around the icons all around FreeCAD, it might be a good idea to standardise some sizes?
I agree, I actually was trying to standardize it! You'll notice that most are the same size as is used in the draft workbench for example, which was one of the first workbenches I did.

In some of the Sketcher icons, there were simply so many points that I had to reduce them to prevent overlapping. In these cases, I tried to reduce control points first and leave nodes the 'standard' size. This approach generally worked, but occasionally you would get two 'kissing' nodes where before they had a pixel or so distance.

Since this effect is basically invisible from <= 24px I figured it wouldn't be too much of a problem in the short to mid term. As you say, I'd like us to find a bit more of a standard for that but first we'll need to simplify a lot of the icons.
User avatar
kkremitzki
Veteran
Posts: 2511
Joined: Thu Mar 03, 2016 9:52 pm
Location: Illinois

Re: Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by kkremitzki »

Nice, these look really slick; there's especially a lot of icons that previously looked bad on one of the three backgrounds at a small size but are now legible.
Like my FreeCAD work? I'd appreciate any level of support via Patreon, Liberapay, or PayPal! Read more about what I do at my blog.
User avatar
agryson
Posts: 463
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2016 8:30 am
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact:

Re: Sketcher icons (finally) aligned

Post by agryson »

Post Reply