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Remove Transparency
* In Bforartists & Blender, all menu and dropdown are having transparency. Due to this, everything behind menu is get visible somehow. which decrease readability. so remove transparency from all menu and dropdown.
KISS (keep it simple)
*No need of icon everywhere, add only where it is really required:- Menu icon is good thing but if you add infront of most common function then design start to looks complex. so add only where it is required.
*Avoid black color, use dark grey color,
*Arrange item in such a way that can make possible to access most frequently item easily.
Tooltip
tooltip must have high contrast as compare to other element.
Thanks for the ideas. Unfortunately …
The grey menu at the right is in fact harder to read, sorry.
From the UI design point of view, you need minimum 160 of 255 contrast between letters and background. Grey background is to avoid. So you best have either have white background and black letters, or black background with white letters. We have a dark standard theme, white panels would not fit. Same goes for the tooltips. Black fits better.
The transparent menus are discutable. I love the way it is. But i don’t know where this is defined anyways ^^
Same goes for the icons. For me it’s a gods gift not to have the need to read the text. I read the text two or three times to khow what is where, then i orient at the icons in the text menus. Faster
I like it as it is
Personally I use the icons as an aid before reading the text, this is what defines BFA over Blender for me.. even if there was an option to make that menu more Blender like, I wouldn’t use it
This one is easy to change in USER PREFERENCES > THEMES > USER INTERFACE > MENU BACK. – Just turn the aplha value A to 1 to make the menu fully opaque.
Although I like the transparency effect as well, I might agree, that it looks less cluttererd and is easier to read without it. I wouldn´t change the colors though, I think it works well with 100% opacity and the dark grey background.
I agree on the benefit of the icons, once you get used to them they are actually great help in locating a specific item faster.
A menu without icons….. yeah, I like Icons. I don’t have to read to know what a thing is or does. It is language agnostic so easier to teach people who don’t have English as a first language, and the visual muscle memory is easier to program with a visual marker to go to – instead of markers that look identical to the other markers.
Good UI design is not jus typography, but good iconography also. The brain works best with an overall siluette of a shape to jump to a conclusion that it’s something good or bad or just something – first macro shape, then details – it’s how it evolved. So having icons in the UI hits that identifier system in our brains. Only text is NOT that system, and we have to work 2 to 3 times longer to process what a word is (to then program the muscle memory).
I do get the idea that most menus everywhere don’t use icons to be minimalistic and “to the point” and have been like so since the 90s and this is true of the original Blender sourcecode – but in design and human brain functionality… it’s not that useful to not have icons.
I like the bright contrasting colours idea for tooltips though. I wonder if it’s even possible to change those. It makes it look like helpers.
:dance:
Davis has already pointed to the region where you can change the color of the tooltips. But black fits simply better in our layout
Yes, the tooltips can be changed just below the menu color and opacity in the user preferences. – I also think the colors and contrast are good as they are only the transparency of the menus could be considered to improve readability.
As for the tooltips I was wondering if it wouldn´t be better to turn the phyton tooltips off by default? – Although very practical for coding, they make the tooltips look more complicated than they are to the average artist I believe. That under the hood info might be better behind the scenes to make the interface feel even less intimidating. Since it can be turned on in the user preferences with one click, no developer should complain about this change anyway, I guess?
Make an issue
For me it’s nasty then though. I work a lot with the factory settings and with the Python code …
I made an issue. – It´s literally one click on and off.
– And this would be only needed for the official releases, all the developer versions in between are just that I guess.Hi all.
Chiming in here. Such an interesting discussion!
What if one did a compromise to reduce clutter and still have the icons?
Simpler icons with black border, that is straight to the point. Less eye sore for sure. This might be used on other menu/basic icons, like view icons, import/export formats, render icon/ animation buttons maybe with color code on some.
Here’s a mockup.
EDIT: Color coded. (Colors are not tuned)
I love the style
I know that the current iconset is a bit too colorful. As told, a new consistent iconset would be the next step of evolution. It just needs somebody to work at.
What makes it so hard is the sheer amount of needed icons. Over 1200 at the moment …
The color coded version looks really good. – I think most of the existing icons could be changed to more simple, single color icons quite easily, if they are all available as vector files? Without the need for newly invented icons that should go relatively fast. The task should be best split up into chunks, so that multiple people can work on the icons at the same time. Reworking “only” a few hundred icons is also not as intimidating as changing all 1200 at once.
Thanks!
I would advice to start with the basic icons (menus, animation, render, properties, etc).
When they are consistent in style, one can start with the phletora of special icons. They must probably look a bit different because of the complexity some of them have to portray. Maybe 3 colors/shades as standard. It is also good to get a little training on the icon style, before starting with the complicated ones.
But first of all color codes should be thoroughly planned.
The icons are based on Google’s material design which is Apache License Version 2.0. So free to use modify without attribution or anything.
They have 900 icons which we can use as a base. These are icons people already know, so this makes the UI experience even more streamlined.
I’ll comment more later when I get home from work.
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