[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [libreoffice-design] What Happened to the Flat Icon Set

[Emir Yâsin SARI]

> - the "flat/monochrome icons" subject is more about *usability* than just aesthetic ; IMHO, it's a waste of time to just want to change icons without a UI evolution.

> - when you compare with Thunderbird, look how many icon are in the default toolbar ? 6 plus the new "menu icon" at the far right.
> most important, these 6 icons have a label.
> 
> - how many icons in LO ? ~40

> - the endless discussion about having our own design rules or following each os rules has to be closed by the TDF.

Speaking as an OS X user, current LO UI design does not fit well under Mac OS X. First of all, neither OS X window bars are not designed to house this amount of icons LO has, nor it is not feasible to try to implement this current toolbar design with a native OS X design approach. So even if we change the icons with flat/monochrome ones, they will look alienated. 

Most OS X software place a minimal number of icons to their window bar, and they take a different approach for housing the other software functions. 

Examples: 

-MS Office has incorporated ribbon placed under the main window bar. Main window bar only houses basic open/save/cut/copy/paste functions. Outlook has only six icons on the window bar. 
-Pages has a minimal number of icons on the window bar, and an inspector is used to reach other editing features. The window bar icons of Pages could be a nice reference point about how colour icons can be placed within gray gradient. 

Summary - I think, rather than converting all icons to flat/monochrome ones at this state, firstly three different design approaches should be created. This can be started on the wiki, or polls at the initial state. The point is, once the direction of the UI is set regardless of the coding power needed, with each incremental update we could get easy to that point - and having a UI goal to reach will surely attract more designers and developers to give a hand. 

And then the number of icons or whatever stuff is needed could be decided upon. 

I suggest every experts of three platforms should list their ideas with the contribution of the UX team, under three headers, and then we can start to do whatever is necessary (mock-ups etc.). Common wishes/ideas would construct the early sketches and the basic new UI design, then platform specific changes could be applied more easily.

-Emir



18 Şub 2013 tarihinde 12:09 saatinde, Michel Renon şunları yazdı:

> Le 18/02/2013 08:06, Emir Yâsin SARI a écrit :
>> +1
>> 
>> And monochrome icons are the ideal icon types for a possible "native" OS X interface. For that reason it would be logical to have a complete monochrome/flat icon set at hand.
>> 
>> Emir
>> 
> 
> (it's not a direct answer to you Emir, but to the whole thread)
> 
> I would like to share some few reflexions about this subject :
> 
> - the "flat/monochrome icons" subject is more about *usability* than just aesthetic ; IMHO, it's a waste of time to just want to change icons without a UI evolution.
> 
> - the endless discussion about having our own design rules or following each os rules has to be closed by the TDF.
> 
> - why is there the general assumption that color in icon is bad ?
> As a user, the color is really helpful for me : i know that the "save as pdf" is the red one on the top left corner (ok, it's just my only opinion so it's not an argument)
> 
> - when you compare with Thunderbird, look how many icon are in the default toolbar ? 6 plus the new "menu icon" at the far right.
> most important, these 6 icons have a label.
> 
> - how many icons in LO ? ~40
> 
> - we should also take care of the size of icons : it changes a lot the perception of icons
> 
> - As a jqueryUI user, I found a theme preview with icon preview :
> jqueryUI.com/themeroller
> in the left column, select "gallery" then the "flick" theme.
> Then scroll the page to discover the list of icons.
> There are monochrome/flat. If it was a real toolbar, would you be a happy user ?
> 
> 
> - In the wordpress editor too, they use monochrome icons. As a user, it slows my workflow because I have to really precisely search/look/select the icon I want (again a personal feed-back).
> 
> 
> 
> 
> - Such a subject is very important and should be handled very carefully.
> We need to follow a standard and professional way of doing :
>   - collect proposals
>   - create prototypes
>   - test prototypes by real users
>   - iterate until a prototype has a very high feed-back (we'll never have 100% positive feed-back)
>   - only then, integrate the new icon set in a public release.
> 
> LibreOffice has *millions* of users and they expect a lot. We have to release new UI only if it has been strongly tested and validated. We can't consider users as early testers because it's not their job.
> 
> Thanks,
> Michel
> 
> 
> 
> 
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