COIL iconTheme

[triplus]

Yep, when you added the outline, icons gained in weight. As such they usually can better address different possible backgrounds. Without using the outline, a thin design approach can be pursued, and the results can look good.

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 30#p296011

That is what i was referring to, when i said you need to decide, if you want to introduce a compromise or not. A compromise in a form of adding weight to icons. Or you won't do that and will rather go after the thin design. Note that there might be more clever ways to address different possible backgrounds. Adding the outline approach in such way is likely just one of them.

P.S. In the end the dilemma i guess isn't as hard as it looks like. As there can be 3 variants of the COIL icon theme. People changing the colors in icons for themselves? Such things usually aren't pursued by most people and usually most just use icon theme pack as is and choose one based on their personal preferences.

[1D_Inc]

Or you won't do that and will rather go after the thin design.

Well, we've come there for pure COIL design, so it's our goal)

Note that there might be more clever ways to address different possible backgrounds. Adding the outline approach in such way is likely just one of them.

There are no other ways to keep such tough minimal design - single width wire and no fills gives 2 colors per icon, less than 8 colors in palette.
This minimal solution is the deepest for 1000 icons pack, other design solutions will require some relief measures, like outline, fill, gradients, etc.
Like Simple Icon theme, that contains multiple width and fills for accents.
More clever styles can be based on COIL, keeping COIL's shapes, but none of them will have deeper minimal style.
They can exist but they are out of scope of current research.

P.S. In the end the dilemma i guess isn't as hard as it looks like. As there can be 3 variants of the COIL icon theme. People changing the colors in icons for themselves? Such things usually aren't pursued by most people and usually most just use icon theme pack as is and choose one based on their personal preferences.

For sure.
This is a complex solution - final product is planned to consist from
= 3 final themes (dark blue / light blue / light colored) to provide COIL defaults for most people
= and SVG + Slicer to provide flexible customization in case if needed.

Dark blue + Light blue if there will be no background color changes to make it possible to get Unified one.
It is conceived in such a way.

[1D_Inc]

By the way, is there news about default names icon support for IconTheme addon, to see entire interface in custom style?

[1D_Inc]

The last big FreeCAD icon theme overhaul done by @agryson was all about that. And that is the main reason FreeCAD icons gain a little bit of weight.

The main reason FreeCAD icons gain it's weight and then heavily bright/saturated colors
(to outweigh black outline - it is not possible to outweight it with calm colors),
that it was assumed that the user will switch multiple full-sRGB backgrounds often.

Besides the fact that it diverges from the actual use (users usually work in one preferred color scheme, which is selected once),
FreeCAD backgrounds are limited with only 2 hoar colors by default to switch between.

So, maybe, outline design is a bit excess for that finite conditions.

[ickby]

I'm just following along the work done here, great work! one remark:

Besides the fact that it diverges from the actual use (users usually work in one preferred color scheme, which is selected once),
FreeCAD backgrounds are limited with only 2 hoar colors by default to switch between.

So, maybe, outline design is a bit excess for that finite conditions.

That is not correct. Freecad provides two overriding color shemes you can set in the preferenses. However, as it uses QT for its UI the whole style of the application and color depends on system settings. So every Linux distro has different UI style and colors. For windows IMHO there is a default one shipped, but with some technical knoweledge (and without programming) one could also change styles to infinite numbers.

[yorik]

I really like your "experimental" approach @1D_Inc. Indeed as @triplus explained, we went in latest iterations more and more towards "fail-safe" icon style that suits all possible themes. But that was more a conservative position, due to having very few people working on icon design, and we tried to make things as "future-proof" as possible. I still think it's a safe direction for a default set of icons.

But you are proposing something way beyond that, where the FreeCAD icons are becoming a fully themable thing. So exploring new paths makes complete sense. In a world where you can auto-generate color variations of a same set, many new possibilities arise and old rules don't necessarily apply.

About the dark theme I use, it's actually my desktop GTK theme (minwaita-dark), my Qt is set to use the current GTK theme. That's one of the cool crazy things you can do on linux and that's not simple at all on windows... I guess it wouldn't be hard to mimic it using qss stylesheets. I'll try to make one...

[triplus]

By the way, is there news about default names icon support for IconTheme addon, to see entire interface in custom style?

Current status is all commands (from default set of workbenches) located on toolbars should be supported in FreeCAD 0.18. Including toggle ones and buttons with menus. That is when an icon theme pack is provided as a binary resource file:

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 90#p297314

P.S. For other areas a few additional pull requests will be needed in the future.

[1D_Inc]

Well, seems, Linux support explains everything)
Also faced with problems with linux paths during making IconSlicer, fixed it up just today.
Well, we all made a very nice research, hopes it's results will be interesting and useful)

[triplus]

Windows and macOS platforms traditionally didn't want to give people any control over this. With the introduction of the dark mode, this i guess changed. I took a quick look and i see they use "COIL" alike icon theme for some icons in Office:

https://www.howtogeek.com/360470/how-to ... ft-office/

Yep, they solved it with the introduction of light and dark variant of the set icon theme!

[1D_Inc]

Windows and macOS platforms traditionally didn't want to give people any control over this.

Well, now we know why.

Yep, they solved it with the introduction of light and dark variant of the set icon theme!

It is kinda mainstream, so everybody tries to go there =)