As action in this thread is winding down a bit, could I ask you to have a look at the axis3d icons above in New icons in nightly (5.).
With the proposed replacements I tried to alleviate the difficulty in making out the depth cues in the current version of those icons.
Also having some ideas how to improve the “flip” icon.
Very nice and intuitive icons, I’m only afraid that the ‘cartoonish’ style will not blend with the overall theme well.
If you can be specific about what aspects strike you as such, I can try to tweak them and we can see what the impact is. Of course you’re also invited to grab the svg files from post 235 and play around with them yourself 
ps. I’m also ok with any of my proposed icons to be grabbed and used as examples for what doesn’t fit the intended style guide (cc @craftyjon).
Hard do say for sure, it’s rather general impression. Probably the front lines of varying width and the shadow edges at different angles than the cube’s edges.
As I explained, i really like them for the intuitiveness, but find most of the icons in the theme to use simplified/minimalistic style without visual ornamentation.
Probably in some time we will be able to use alternative iconsets for Kicad, and then these could find their deserved home.
These fancy cubes are still viewed from a corner / diagonal, and therefore information between “Front” and “back” is very minimal. I suspect the triangle in the corner is supposed to be the “eye” location, but this is not very clear and it looks too much like the “foldout” corner as used in for example the measurement icons.
These fancy cubes are still viewed from a corner / diagonal
yes. I found this to be a challenge with cube depictions.
Looking at the Zoom In / Zoom Out icons above them, one could dial back the cube line widths a bit to be closer to that line width, as long as it doesn’t sacrifice readability.
In terms of line width, the Unity logo cube design is pretty smart - constant line width, but delibrate notches to depict “back”.
looks too much like the “foldout” corner
Heh, my proposal to let these corners point into directions in which the toolbar / menu opens was turned down with the argument that the user should look for them in the same corner, so strictly speaking it would need to be black and in the bottom right corner to qualify 
For me, it’s mostly a marker / arrow to the front direction.
allow me to bring up the annotate icon again:
currently: 
as per discussion above: png 
svg 
Yes, and maybe “R?” centralized instead of “R ?” left aligned. This appear more like the part when are placed.
Note: I like of the “42 easter eagle”
The idea with the alignment of “R” and “?” was to draw the focus on the difference “?” -> “42”, which in my opinion is the central story of “annotate”. The spacing between “R” and “42” is also deliberate to guide the focus away from the prefix. Maybe that doesn’t work everybody. Concerning “looks more like the part as-placed” one could counter that the part in the symbol already is a more abstract representation, with field texts outside the symbol itself, which puts it up for debate
It may be a minor factor with so few letters, but I feel that it helps. To illustrate how alignment helps with discerning differences, consider this example:
compare the time it takes to spot the deviations in the 6th character.
Everyone who doesn’t like the red “warning signs” (see New icons in nightly above):
I filed an issue for this, https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/7296. Please comment and/or upvote.
Dark icon theme has been integrated and is available on GTK builds (Linux). See https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/3923#note_528717181.
See also https://www.mail-archive.com/kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net/msg39375.html if you want to know where the icons are – apparently @craftyjon implemented a new icon loading system with external files. It should be possible to share icon sets now or easily test modified icons.
The icons now seem to reside in a separate resources file, namely:
KiCad/share/kicad/resources/images.tar.gz
So this probably gives some possibility for easy distribution of alternative icon sets.
What that would mean? Kicad themes, baby
Hmmm,
maybe write a script so I have a different Coccinella Magnifica for the DRC check each day.
If anything could convince me to skip a version of Kicad, it would be a dark or inverted color theme, white text on a black or dark background. I very much dislike this inversion of dark and light.
I prefer working with black text on a white background because I grew writing black or blue pen or pencil marks on white paper. And my preference is the same to this day.
good job it is optional
The editor theme itself is configurable now and won’t be changing from what we have now in 5.99 which is slightly different from 5.1.
The icon theme for dark/light mode can be turned on/off but is also tied to your operating system supporting dark and light mode. Linux (GTK) and macOS support it and will get the enhancement. Windows does not support dark mode for Win32 apps unforunately.
I was planning on turning icon theme selection on for Windows anyway for people using high contrast mode or customizing their win32 color theme, I just need to test if that has any issues. KiCad just won’t be able to respond to the Windows 10 “dark mode” option which is unavailable to win32 apps as Mark says
Ah yes you can detect high constrast mode and it does change the theme.
But generally there’s a third theme of icons for that mode in Microsoft land (even simpler icons)
I don’t plan on going down that road. Dark mode icons will be better than nothing.
