To resume what are my thought about that icon pack, I think they are not rupturing enough with the old ones. Right now they boldly convey a new style while staying shy of new idioms. The things I didn’t liked about the old icons have stayed (libraries looking like a bookshelf for example (winrar anyone)). I think I would have preferred much more drastic changes, completely ditching the old idioms, and full monochrome very bold shapes.
But still, thanks a lot for the great work. It’s 480 already amazing streamlined icons.
A note to everyone checking this out: The “V6” icons (V6 is not out yet) are still changing daily, so this PDF is just a snapshot of what the icons looked like on one day.
I’m talking about creating a new icon set based on the old one.
Are we making this more difficult than what it actually is?
Yes, sure, but that’s not a problem here. If Seth could actually give us the list of problematic/non-problematic icons it would help tremendously. Then we could see which icons would need replacing. More probably the icons which have KiCad inspired content do have paper trails. The generic icons like trashcans, cut/copy/paste can be replaced easily by copying them unmodified or modified from 3rd party sources but this time embedding the copyright information and licence. Some KiCad specific icons can be copied from the new set, modified or unmodified, because they have the paper trail.
From reading the icon credits and the Gitlab issues, there appear to be two issues with licensing:
Not all the original attributions are known
There are a smattering of disparate licenses for the ones that are known
Therefore, it sounds like the Devs would like to get the entire icon set under a single common license moving forward. It also sounds like the leg work has been done to get a legal advise on what the bounds are. This seems like a reasonable ask, and would help Kicad moving forward. But it does means two things:
All new icons will have to be created
The community should give constructive feedback in #1
The icon work so far is looking promising, and many people have given great feedback. I’m looking forward to seeing the final product in V6. Thanks!
I might be in the minority here, but I like the new icons. Nice work!
I’m surprising by all the bike-shedding on here, but I shouldn’t be. 4 or 5 years ago when Solidworks changed their icons, the user base got so up in arms they had to issue a public statement and quickly implement a “classic mode”. Obviously a straightforward fix when you own the old icon copyrights and you are charging users a couple thousand dollars a year.
From https://blog.trimech.com/new-in-solidworks-2016-turn-back-time-with-classic-icon-colors:
I liked the newer SW interface and I think as others have pointed out, the new KiCad icons have followed industry trends.
While you may feel the need to blame people for bike-shedding, your contribution to a recurrent pattern of users being provoked by swapping around entire icon sets is duly noted. Autodesk did this with Eagle8, not having learned from Solidworks a year earlier, as it seems. I’ll give KiCad the benefit of the doubt that everybody was just too busy and buried in work to put some thought to communicating the changes, but it still remains a pretty boneheaded move and the backlash is just and well-deserved.
The current KiCad icon candidates seem to use colors and gray tones to hide contrast instead of accentuating details in a well-measured fashion.
Compared to the LibreOffice7 icons, it’s obvious what could have been achieved with more discipline, high contrast and fewer details:
UI/UX always hit close to home because this is what people interact with
I think the biggest issue is the heavily reliance on gray and blue. These are already quite close together on the colour map. Couple with thin lines AND the blue used to highlight a modal tool… there are some clarity issues when it comes to the icons
It feels like changing the UI language altogether. It’s a visual language, after all.
I’ve been thinking about color blindness lately, too. One of the tests for icon “fitness” could include converting them to grayscale and checking whether they still work.
not only is red-on-blue an eyesore, but in this test 3 out of 4 icons are having a bit of a meltdown here.
Compare these to variants that have contrast features and boundaries explicitly added:
Oh, yeah:
And on that note… the image processing is pretty awful. I did see significantly better scaling / sharpening algorithms out there… would need to go hunt them down.
Once the monochrome is worked out - i.e. similar to your approach converting all to grayscale - and seeing what gives, the coloring of them should be easier and saver… and it gives a simple black&white set to boot
The style is a lot clearer than the gray ones below that look a bit mushy. One really need to look at the icons very in small size to appreciate how they will look.
Specific: The partially hidden template part might not be showing up very well at small size though. May be put it in the front as in the 5.1 icon (although it would be logical if it was behind)?
I really love the style. Reminds me classic Mac, and even the color is similar to System7 colors.
Maybe i’d simplify base icon, to make “Project using template” easier to distinguish. And definitely Magnifying glass is not the right symbol for Open - opened “folder” symbol is commonly used for this.
