Totally agree that the round red traffic signs obfuscate more than they clarify, which I reported a week ago on gitlab
There are a lot of pink “Traffic signs” on icons. These are much to big, which obfuscates the underlying icons too much. Also a circle with some symbol (arrow, cross, question mark, etc) in it is double.
I suggest to remove the circle completely, and instead put the arrow, cross, question mark, etc in a contrasting color.
[Edit] To be fair: A lot of the red traffic signs have already disappeared. Some I remember were the star on the “new Footprint” Wizard in the Footprint editor, and the “add symbol” opamp icon in Eeschema.
Thanks. Regarding #6668, I understand it as “work on the main / control panel icons” is considered done. We may need to rescue / break out some insights and issues that are in there.
I agree that the red/ping overlay icons can be improved.
The overlay icons are not consistent. Some of the icons are “positive” (star, gear, magnifying glass) drawn in red/pink, while other (majority) are “negative” drawn as white on red/pink background.
Seeing red/pink circle is causing me to associate with trouble/attention. Now this might be just me and my brains, but in EU traffic signs with red border are used to communicate prohibition/warning (Not to mention dropbox/tortoisegit overlay icons in Windows file explorer)
The “negative” icons also have less available area. If they would be drawn in “positive” sense, they would have more area and would be more plain/distinct.
Why? Going from 2 to three characters is an extra visual clue that something is being added.
Also, I’ve decided I like the red better than the black, because red fits better with the rest of the theme. (orangy) red is used throughout the theme to indicate changes.
Another idea:
Remove the arrow altogether, and put the “42” in red. The text could then be a bit higher, which might improve readability, and it also signifies better what is actually changing.
I really liked the “123” text on the old icon (KiCad V4 I think) which got changed to a simple red line.
here’s what the red triangle would look like…
png svg
one advantage I see here is that the red doesn’t pretend to be part of the upper component as much.
Our experimental results indicated that
users prefer and are twice as fast at using the ViewCube with
dragging (to perform orbit operations with view snapping)
compared to the ―single click based‖ view switching techniques.
Also, by making the scene orientation always visible via the
ViewCube as a proxy for the 3D scene, we make visible the effect
of other application tools including ArcBall functionality. We
found no significant performance effects of varying the
ViewCube’s labeling schemes (using text, 2D graphics, a 3D
proxy model, or no labels) but to facilitate collaboration we
believe text labels are most beneficial.
ugh… classic. So it could almost be that with earliest patent listed as 2007-03-28, this is one of the first publications after the fact. Everything is poisoned by patent law ^^
and a proposal from above to make the backgrounds more distinct, avoiding the look of 60° rotations
but not fixing the “right = right, left = front” conflict.
Now one could rotate the cube slightly and test orthographic vs. perspective projections to end up with something functionally equivalent to the old (v5) icons.
Here’s a rough sketch of planes looking down into a wireframe cube (l-to-r: back, left, bottom, right, top, front)
Hey guys, I am seeing these new icons on Kicad Nightly.
Then I found this thread here.
I don’t have much to say, especially because I didn’t have time to read the whole thread. But these round corner squares as icons are so bad for me. Their information is also pretty hard to understand.
Yeah, I know it will be pretty hard to match all of the known operating systems and styles. But in this case, is better to improve icons being closer to the original ones. In this way, the change will be more gradual.
The color scheme is not there yet for the dark theme too, but this is also something that you already know.
If you compare the first iteration in the first screenshots in this thread with the current nightlies you can see that the current set of the main KiCad window is “relatively close” to the original set. Hopefully the problems with the red details will be fixed, then I will be happy and won’t miss the old icon set except maybe for some details.
I don’t know what’s the problem with the round corners, they look better than sharp corners. The informativeness of the first iteration was awful, the current set is much better and I don’t see why it would be worse than the original in that respect. I think you are just accustomed to the old set as all we were
Yep, it might be the fact that I am not used to them. I don’t know, I just don’t like them, these round-corner rectangles just look childish. But improving the color theme for dark environments may help a bit in my case. Lets, see. I hope to have this dark theme for v6. And of course, these things can always be improved with time.
No, kicad actually hints at big brother’s eye spying on all of us. (just kidding)
@Seth_h
I gotta say from the time when I started this toppic kicad icons have gone a long way. For me it went from “ugh” to “I can live with that” to “I actually like these more than v5 icons” in the matter of weeks. There are still a few icons that definitely should be improved, but overall it’s starting to look very nice.
Great work!
svg 
