Yeah, I agree. The properties tabs seem to be the main problem area, where you need to differentiate multiple icons close together, very often, and without any text next to it.
Still not the place for it. Your last-wordism is one of the reasons you are taken to be a belligerent rather than genuine when you say you’d contribute. Well, that and…
BF needs to say they were wrong:
You said you would not be working on it:
You think BF should pay for the artists’ work:
You won’t pay for it yourself or do the work yourself:
.
Perhaps you went further than you intended to in your zeal, but it’s right there for people to read Antaoiz. I offered to do the work if a patch would be accepted, regardless of their view which icons were better. You’re stating that you (“& likely others”) won’t until the BF admits their icons are bad. Think about that approach and why people might consider you more interested in winning an argument than contributing to the project.
4 Likes
Outlines might cause readability issues.
I would have a hard time reading a book, written in outlines. Coloring outlined letters in a book would not make that much difference.
So, arguing about readability, why not consider outlines?
I am fine with the new icons, and I do not want to be part for this overgeneralizing, ranting, or the hunt for theories.
This is meant to be an approach to look at the icons, whether percepted readability issues of specific icons do relate to use of outline shapes.
2 Likes
I know the forum management has changed, but aren’t quote battles (like the one we’re seeing now) still banned according to the discussion rules?
Custom icon sets and icon color theming will be all but needed as I don’t think the current impasse is ever going to be resolved, switch directions and bring in colorful icons and you will hear the “don’t make Blender a Christmas tree” arguments again (with supposed * undeniable * facts and objective reasoning to back it up).
5 Likes
Please dont make every thing neon color thats distracting.
And its looks a bit like the christmas tree from home alone.
3 Likes
made this point in the last post, but.
said the pot to the kettle.
I asked for them to say they were subpar, not to say they were wrong in using them.
“When in all honesty right now…”
“The last few posts have been about what has happened, not about what’s happening now.”
“On the chance…”
Since Brecht’s post I have been weighing up learning time and how long it would take me to give it a shot. Still probably not the best person for it, and I might be too busy to make significant progress because work just kicked in a new project. But I’m considering trying to see how I can do at adding onto his new icon set, if he doesn’t mind.
Outlines have been part of the discussion, though they take a backseat. But they would be one of the first things I think the icons need. Since they would enable the icons to be almost any colour on any background.
I believe they are and, if the mods determine it needs to be deleted, I’ll take it on the chin. I’m unsure how one proves someone said something they claim they did not without quoting them though.
I am getting a sense of why Blender devs stay off the forums now though. When someone considering weighing up the possibility of working on something as a counter to the fact that others are putting in real world effort rather than just complaining - it’s pretty damned hard not to react poorly to that sense of entitlement.
well that’s big of you, never mind the annoyance you are causing in the thread with your persistence…
and… developers stay off the forums because of people like you who can’t self regulate. 
I am no more persistent or less self-regulatory than Antaioz. However, thanks for your input. I’ll endeavour to give your view all the consideration you give mine.
8 Likes
Looks way better to me having those colors separate the “groups”.
Don’t think everything needs a color, just when there are many of them close together that somehow belongs in a “group”. Even spatially separation would help further. Newests ideas in the other icon thread shows these “groups” separated with a horizontal separator.
But yeah, how do you make them work for “any theme”?
When this started, I thought there was now a limitation in the system that prevented use of colors, like “Blender icons now restricted to 2 colors for optimizing reasons” or something silly like that.
@enenra I also want to know what’s that element. I wrote this:
https://gist.github.com/RNavega/77a68c506afa959b7cfda7f8ccd655c1#file-random-theme-operator-py
It works fine with 2.79, I hope it works with 2.8.
Follow the instructions on that page. Holding right (or left, to go back) will let you change the colors of all UI elements, until you get to that one. Then you can report back with the full name of that element so we can find out what it is.
3 Likes
For making a more informed decision, anyone got good links or reading suggestions on the different styles or schools of icon creation?
The script doesn’t work correctly because it doesn’t display the names as it changes colors.
However it did help me find it and it’s called:
User Interface–>Styles–> Editor Outline
Thank you!
1 Like
I agree.
The Icons are very well designed and with colors you can finally see them too.
To me it’s crystal clear that if someone (who has proven his skill and reliability) does “something” willingly and this “something” is seen as better than the current “whatever”, and if no problems will apparently arise of it, BF will change to it… It’s not a question of devs being stubborn or unwilling to “say they were wrong” like some people are thinking.
All it takes is:
-proven skill and reliability, to prevent future issues
-willingness to do it (probably for free in this case)
-result is “better” (:“has more positives than negatives” in devs eyes) than the current implementation.
That’s why they decided to change the icon set to Jen’s monochrome set:
-Jendrzych has already proven himself when he did the old icon sheet.
-He was willing to do something new (according to his tastes) on his own free time, without payment
-Devs decided that using his new work was better than increasing and maintaining the old icon sheet, for reasons of: speed/simplicity/convenience/etc. Unfortunately, ‘Readability’ was an aspect that suffered a negative impact, but not enough to surpass the said positives in dev’s eyes.
So to change the icon set once again, one has to:
-Show that he is up for the task, both in terms of skill, and of available time (for maintaining and adding when necessary in the future)
-Willing to work on it with no payment, because this is apparently not a (paid) priority for BF, now that we have Jen’s working on his monochrome set.
-The result should be better (more positives than negatives than Jen’s new icons), which in this case would probably mean: is also easy/fast to create and change (even by other artists), has greater readability, maintains a professional look, has relatively good acceptance from the community, etc.
2 Likes
I agree, I’m now pretty fond of the new icons, but I keep my opinion that if they were shaded and colored, they would (factually?) be more readable. But since Blender is an ever evolving beast, I’m confident that the work done can and probably will be improved over time, since some flaws tend to become more evident as time passes.
We don’t have to look further than the New Icons topic.
@RNavega has already shown to me that he is capable of creating shaded/outlined versions of Jendrzych’s icons.
The question is, would he be willing to pick every icon made by Jen and create a shaded (and possibly colored) version of it, for free, and be willing to keep working on it on futher versions (2.81 forwards)?
Because I’m 100% sure that if the meets the criteria above (-proven skill and reliability-willingness to do it/-result is “better”) his iconset could be put in blender instead of Jendrzych’s (maybe on 2.81 or other further version)
3 Likes
As a new blender user, but not new to the world of 3D, I find the mono-colored icons completely fine and in fact a huge step above what was in 2.79 and many other 3D programs.
I have had no problem distinguishing icons from each other.
1 Like
My problem with Monochrome icons is that we are designing for a very broad case (multiple themes) when in reality most people use the default theme. Even then, most themes are mostly some darker shade of gray. How much value does having multiple themes bring to Blender? Most applications don’t really bother with theming but have a consistent opinionated visual identity.
An alternative may be to have visually simple set of icons that are less noisy than the 2.7* icons and let people design their themes around those.
1 Like
from what I read no one criticizes the work of @jendrzych , what people complain about is only the difficulty of seeing with the monocolour, which with the customization of colors is a relative problem and easily resolvable.
‘That’s all folks’
1 Like
To be honest I’d rather chip in to a crowdfunding campaign to hire a fulltime designer, someone that can tweak icons at the pixel level for maximum clarity.
I’m nowhere near the skill level needed for such a thing heh
Thanks for the thought!
1 Like