[Qgis-developer] New Icons - difficult to "read"

[Jonathan Moules]

+1 for unified data adding button. From a use-perspective there's no good
reason that raster adding should be separate from vectors for instance.


Relating to the new iconset - I agree with liking the style and see what
it's trying to do. The design philosophy seems to be that there are common
components which are then glued together. A yellow star seems to mean
"new", a magnifying glass means some sort of zoom thing etc.

It's logical, the sort of thing that makes sense to a developer.

The problem is, I don't believe it works. Icons should be
immediately recognisable - if you have 10 (TEN!) icons which have a big
magnifying glass and then only a small portion of the icon is different
between each of them, they become harder to use.

In depth example: take the Back, Next, and Refresh view icons. The new QGIS
icons all have a magnifying glass behind them (I can barely make out the
"refresh" circle). Why? In comparison, I have four web-browsers in front of
me, all have these buttons and all of them are simple arrows/refresh
circles. None of them have a picture of a web-page behind them.
ArcGIS and MapModeller both use simple arrows/circles too. MapInfo doesn't
seem to have this functionality.
At this point these icons are standard conventions, but the QGIS 2.0
iconography makes that part only 1/6th of the actual icon, instead giving
prominence to a magnifying glass that's entirely unnecessary.

Jonathan

On 27 May 2013 23:11, Antonio Locandro <antoniolocandro at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Just a thought, but most of the problems are due to the fact each *add
> feature* has an icon for "quick access". I would simply vote to have an
> unified add data button and then select the data you want, someone has
> proposed something about it but don´t know if it will make it for 2.0 nor
> do I remember the exact reference. IMHO QGIS has way to many icons
> cluttering the UI and using precious space specially on small screen laptops
>
> *Ing. Antonio Locandro*
> Tegucigalpa, Honduras
> +504 9503 5747
> Need a GPS map for Central America, Asia or South America / Necesitas un
> mapa GPS para Centro America, Asia o Sur America<http://store.gpstravelmaps.com/?Click=63>
>
>
>
>
> > Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 23:07:16 +0200
> > From: robert at szczepanek.pl
> > To: lists at linfiniti.com
> > CC: qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> > Subject: Re: [Qgis-developer] New Icons - difficult to "read"
>
> >
> > Hi Tim,
> >
> > On 25.05.2013 11:06, Tim Sutton wrote:
> > >
> > > @Robert - what about using a background colour scheme whereby e.g. all
> > > add layer icons get the same background colour and then you can remove
> > > e.g. the + and layer picture elements as they are visually grouped.
> > > Just a thought anyway....
> >
> > This is an interesting idea, but I'm afraid hard to implement. We could
> > get very strange mixture of colours (location of icons changes...). We
> > could also make one background colour per toolbar. But there are several
> > toolbars and we (man) - in opposite to women - don't recognize so many
> > colours :)
> >
> > Maybe simply skip some icon elements in toolbars, with many similar
> > operations (like add layer)?
> > regards,
> > Robert
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
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