Icons are not hard to read by itshelf. If they have a good layout that allow user to learn a shape is a better way to work. In the proposal the only that have a bad shape is the mesh edit subpanel.
But if we compare the base popup with the proposal is more easy to read and learn.
It’s true that the worst problem is the blue accent. that make hard to put near a lot of buttons. But I don’t think that devs will go to change this now when they have picked a mobile style. Anyway with a more smooth white the panel is better
Initially I also twisted my nose a little while seeing icons instead of text.
But after a little reasoning about it, and having passed a few hours, to recognize the icons and their functions, I believe that all in all it would not hurt to have icons … it is just the time to recognize the icons … but maybe I would do as it was done for the properties buttons, add the colors to better distinguish their functions …
Just because the mind associates and distinguishes and better finds what we are looking for.
I really like these mockups! By comparison the original seems very disorganized.
I do think it’s a pretty subjective thing what people are going to prefer though. I agree with your argument of the discoverability and intuitiveness of the icon UI, but I could see that being a controversial change.
How did you make the mockups? It would be interesting implementing them as an adding for now!
Condensed and/or icon-only panels are bad for discovery when they’re the default expansion state for a popover, but they can fit into a progressive disclosure model if you present (and then remember) the option to condense the popover after the user has interacted with a more verbose version. This would involve something like a “scrunch button” at the bottom of the popover, and preferably an animated state-change that uses easing to draw attention to where the options move to in the condensed layout.
I’ve been accumulating a junk-drawer of settings I like to fiddle with; it doesn’t cover everything in the overlay menus, and a few of the settings are only in there because I wanted to see if adjusting them on the fly was even possible in the first place, but I feel like it strikes a decent balance between density and readability.
It would be nice if we could adjust the increment value for snapping, could work by using the scroll wheel or the numpad + & - keys to adjust the increment size(by value of 5 or if also holding shift, by value of 1 in case of rotation).
The Icons would need descriptive Tooltips for sure. And for good measure I’d also include an option in the System settings to display as Icons and/or Text if desired.
While it is true that it makes the panel much smaller and thus also faster to navigate (less ouse distance), I have to admit that by simply looking at the icons I wasn’t sure what they all were supposed to mean even after having worked with 2.8 for 3 months now.
Otherwise - sure. Icons look good to me.
(Speaking of descriptive tooltips: I’d really love if most tools had much more descriptive tooltips than mostly just echoing what the name of the tool already says it is. When I read a tooltip I expect to discover more info about it not only the info I already saw )
Ah! No! Colouring only folders will be more than enough. And I’d avoid blue, making them yellowish brown (as if made of real recycled paper/cardboard) - this colour is not used by any of glyphs in GUI, and it was colour of the Folder in Blender 2.5x~2.7x.
I can’t create 42 icons for a quick mockup. The icons are place holder picked of blender icons that I have used only to show the idea
The tooltips were part of the proposal, without this the proposal have few sense.
From my pov the good will be better use only the icons of used files colored. Other formats are hiden by default. And the folder icons is enough to differeciate from blender files that must be orange.
My post was a bit of a non sequitur; sorry about that. The second half doesn’t really relate to the first half, and I didn’t intend to imply that my junk-drawer panel was an improvement over your popover mockups. As I said in my first paragraph, an icon-only layout can work if it’s handled properly.
The top row is a tab group, containing 24 settings, and the full panel has total of 63 settings in it at the moment. They’re a mixture of Viewport Overlay options, Viewport Shading options, Object Display options, and some random things pilfered from other places (theme settings, navigation settings, a custom script for toggling object shading in edit mode, etc).
Yes, that image of mine wasn’t very instructive. I only sent that particular one because I already had it saved and I’m lazy.
At that time it was made I was only making sure that I had the means to recolor those icons if needed (which is what required using full white for solid parts). And in particular I was checking to make sure that the recoloring would have the latitude to work well on very light backgrounds too.
The assumption is that these would be white at the merge and default to white afterward. And then add a theme setting to change the folder color to anything if desired. I don’t have a need to change the document color but there might be times when that might be nice. I included them in that capture because at the time I was making sure the smaller internal icon was visible regardless of color chosen for document color.
Would you prefer that we use a particular color for folders by default? That is still possible, but I worry about how they might look in non-thumbnail views.
As long as they are flat and closed I don’t think solid is a problem for that as I can just do the little folder-type icons in dark colors instead if over a brightness threshold.
The tricky part is knowing that white at opacity 1 will become the target color, so variations from that are all done with changes of opacity to let the background darken (or lighten if set to a darker color and on a light background). Obviously they can’t be more than monochrome, like having a white piece of paper inside while the rest is manila, in order for this recoloring to work. We could instead just have one unchangeable full-color folder icon, but that could get tricky on multiple backgrounds and I like the idea of having manila folders on Windows or Blue folders on Mac if we want.
@jendrzych - In case you are considering this, I have a bit more information about how the recoloring works, so might help you designing. You can both add color and subtract color, so can add shadows for example if you like.
Here I started with a monochrome bitmap. Two gradients from pure white at full opacity to zero opacity, and the same for black:
Then during the writing of them they were altered to use “Blender Orange” and this is the result on default theme background and on a lighter background:
)
nice idea (…)
