Yeah, if a bug has 4 legs it’s a bug in the bug.
Might have been intentional
The update board from schematic icon in PcbNew is illegible and does not stand out enough.
Very small graphics in black on grey or blue on gray does not work very well. (Icons appear smaller when displayed on the screen than when screenshot is displayed here.)
The diagonal white/green division and BIG green arrow worked much better in the old version.
Again using the green color as a PCB symbol color is very effective.
While the ladybug is back for bug reporting, I really also liked it for the design rules checker (Ok whether it has 4 or six legs, actually 5 legs could be quite appropriate in this case )
Both of these icons are used very frequently and need to stand out among the others.
First screen shot from latest nightly Version: (5.99.0-7580-g3488ff4013), release build
Some more specific comments for PCBNew icons:
The red eye on the icons for filled areas: The slash across the eye is not legible enough to justify presence of the red eye, and generally red is a warning color and distracting here. Also it is not logical with red eyes on the two top ones but not the bottom one as they are all causing variable action on the same item.
I would suggest to loose the red eyes, make the board and tracks bigger and green to conform to the icon of PCBnew itself - only track green for second one, and only track and outline green for the third one.
likewise I would suggest to make the Board setup icon green as for the PCBnew icon. Black on dark grey looks mushy. The red cogs should be exchanged by a black ones or another color, as the red one could be problematic for the color blind, and is not needed as a warning sign.
Likewise I would suggest to make the add a filled zone icon green as the others related to the same function above. The icon below that could have corner green color to mark that it is keeping out a fill area or other items on the board. Currently it looks a little too much like a zoom or fullscreen icon.
A case where the red color is appropriate, - deletion is risky action and it happens immediately on clicking, justifying a warning, and the icon is simple and legible, much more informative than the old wastebasket.
According to commits list, the Zones icons have been just recently updated so we should wait for the new ones to show up in the next nightly build.
And regarding the badges, @MisterHW suggested here some nice touch-up that prevent the badge from blending with icon itself, even for colorblind users.
Thanks for the reminder, that previous discussion scrolled away from my attention. Also hard to keep up with the developers I am less sure about the @MisterHW solution with thin edges between similar colored (for the colorblind) items, it could easily break down at very small display size but is certainly better than no measure at all.
I am more curious about @Joan_Sparky’s icons in color and line art variants (here and in the GitLab discussion). Was the idea to create a color mode and a colorless mode that can be set by the user?
To save anyone the scrolling, that would be New icons in nightly
I think this has already been picked up and is finding its way into some icons… it might even have started before I pointed it out explicity
That would require user changeable icons within KiCAD… so not anytime soon.
The current approach (which I support and understand) is to get the set that has been introduced up to scratch so it’s ready for v6.
Just keep installing nightlies and check out the icons and then report any issues over at gitlab (or here as a 2nd best choice) to make them better.
The zone/area related icons are clearer now:
The Show Boundaries Only icon – the bitmap – is a bit fuzzy. The dots look like drawn by freehand with a pencil without paying attention. I don’t know why it has been made this way:
Each corner should have clear corner line. Probably line-line-line would be better than dot-dot-dot.
Very nice. I generally like the style of the icons, they just need some refinement around clarity due to the grey and blue being used.
They are definitely getting better and better
This is what happens when you use the SVG line style tool and generate pixel output. If there are no further tweaks needed, we can create a more painstaking version that doesn’t have these artifacts. The current version is easy to modify if needed.
well well one could insinuate that, if willing to accept that one’s work is being discarded later on, not much harm would be in actually producing candidate icons then. That is, if we allow ourselves to not be eaten by work and find a way to show appreciation.
Initially I said I would not contribute because of preceding frustration over work being dismissed, and we agree that striving for polished results has the least chance of being rewarding. I won’t contribute .svg files unless explicitly tasked to do so, that’ll stay. I do enjoy the process in this thread though. It’s nice to see others be passionate about the task and the occasional results of the process.
Yes much better. Now we just need to make them green to show it is PCB areas, in line with the other green PCB icons.
(The Board Setup icon has now become green. The edge between the cogs and the green area as suggested by @MisterHW looks good. )
In the new theme we are using red and blue to indicate copper, matching the default layer colors. We are only using green to indicate “pcbnew” or “PCB”, not to indicate copper in general
Thanks for that clarification, that is important information and changes some arguments. (Personally I still like the classic green even when I produce purple boards for production at OSHPark, but a color blind person might think otherwise.)
I am a bit confused though. The reason I did not see the new default colors is that I loaded one of my old boards that have been re-saved in the new format, chose KiCad default, but color still remained green. I checked it again though and notice that KiCad default was listed twice, and the classic not listed.
Now I notice that if I choose the lower version of KiCad default, I am getting the new default colors.
(sorry if this is straying from the topic, but it is important backgroud information). This problem seems to have been just a glitch, when I restarted KiCad, the top choice became properly labeled with Kicad Classic, but this misled me about what was the new default colors.
If you can find a way to reproduce that, please open a bug report. You should only see the Classic and Default options if you start fresh. If you choose to import settings from a previous version, you’ll get whatever colors you were using in 5.1.
OK, now I see it. The strange line style comes from Inkscape, it’s not made manually.
I’m trying to modify it but I don’t know how to build it into KiCad binaries. Can someone give instructions? Apparently they aren’t built by the normal edit-the-file-and-run-make procedure?
see ./bitmaps_png/CMakeLists.txt
- you need to have some tools in your path and turn on the MAINTAIN_PNGS
flag.
Yes, I can reproduce it. If I first with the open board select classic colors, then close PCBnew, and open the board again (or another board) and go into the color selection dialog again, there will be two instances of KiCad Default. Bug report submitted, Issue #6754
I think the “Draw a graphic polygon” could use a less symmetric polygon image. This pentagon one gimme the impression that I could draw any symmetrical (with equal sizes) polygon (such AutoCAD and etc).