Enhancement: Modernize Graphics/Icon

[nathaneltitane]

Just as a discussion item - would be nice to have some slightly more up to date/consistent graphics that are consistent with more modern UIs from nowadays.

[tcobbs]

There are a few problems.

1. I am not a graphics artist (and neither is Peter). (You can probably already tell that based on the current icons.)
2. I don't particularly like a lot of "modern" icons (which are often monochromatic, thus vastly decreasing their utility). I'm not a big fan of the cartoon-like icons that are popular either.
3. Doing this would be a very large project, requiring many hours of work.
4. I am not a graphics artist.
5. I don't think any graphics artists have offered to do this for LDView*. (Note: due to my whole not liking a lot of "modern" icons, I'm not even sure I would accept such an offer, but I wouldn't reject it out of hand.)

* I have some vague recollection of someone in the past coming up with "modern" versions of at least some of the icons. I can't remember who did it, and I can't track down what they did. I don't remember if I disliked the icons they had or not. Maybe @pbartfai remembers. (Or maybe it is a false memory on my part.)

[nathaneltitane]

I had offered over 6 years ago to submit a new set of graphics and you unfortunately discouraged me from doing so with a very similar set of points.

In opening this thread, I am not expecting either you or Peter to take charge in creating any of those assets.

Rather, as an open source project, I'd be happy to contribute.

Do let me clarify also that by 'modern' I mean something that does not look like it came out of a Windows 3.1 API or ico library 😅

It would just be nice to see a bit of a refresh of the available icon set.

Feel free to close the Ticket if it's still a definite no.

[tcobbs]

Part of the problem with LDView's icons is that they are small (16x16 base, 32x32 @2x). Being small has the advantage of allowing them to take up less space on the toolbar (and be usable in menus in Windows), and the disadvantage of making it a lot more difficult to make them nice. Also:

1. Even though it's standard practice, I actively dislike monochrome icon sets. I find them to actively decrease the functionality by making it more difficult to tell the difference between icons at a quick glance. (I mentioned this above, but wanted to point out that I am very much against monochrome icon sets.) Similarly, I'm not a fan of cartoony icon sets.
2. The icons are the way they are right now due to the 16x16 base size constraint and due to the fact that I created the first ones many many years ago, and I at least attempted to make new ones "fit in". Because of this, it would look really bad to update only a few icons. The whole set mostly needs to be replaced all at once. There are currently 70 toolbar icons at two resolutions each.
3. It's not fair for someone to spend a bunch of time creating new icons only to have me say that I don't like them.

I'm open to the possibility of new icons. I know that you don't like LDView's use of icons in its menus (or least didn't in the past), but even Visual Studio 2019 does that (although theirs have a base size of 14x14 instead of 16x16 like LDView), and I find them to be useful. Having the icons in the menus means either continuing to use 16x16 as the base size, or having separate 16x16 base ones for the menus while having 24x24 base ones in the toolbars. 24x24 would increase the number of files from 140 at a minimum (1x and 2x sizes of 70 icons) to 280.

I guess you could create a few to run by me, and we could maybe come up with something that both of us would be happy with. If so, you could work on the rest.

[nathaneltitane]

Well, if icons are to be made using an svg base, and with obeying certain criteria, regardless of the size anything is manageable.

1. Completely OK with your preferences, you are the uthor after all. Again, it would just be a nice to have.
2. 70 icons is a decent task at hand. I really agree on pushing one big update to revamp them rather than going progressive. I may have been the one who submitted some icons, again, as a tentative approach.
3. As a designer (actually) I am met with this constantly and I really appreciate your regard and fairness in the matter, but I would not have proposed it if I was not ready for some back and forth, or even a complete refusal: it's part of the idea of proposing this enhancement.

To clarify: in the light of using a lot of applications, over the course of my endeavor using GNU-Linux, a lot of them are built around Qt /GTk and have made certain aspects of the UI very flexible in terms of personal preferences.

I am not against (very strong word :) ) the use of icons per se but rather mildly annoyed at the lack of standard behavior across the use of certain applications that do not obey system wide preferences, when say, I decide to have menus only show text for example. I am unsure if LDView had that problem or not on the Linux versions.

Also, having Leocad for a certain time now too, there are certain things in the way the UI is built/managed that make for a very attractive UX model to go by, and resembles a lot what could be expected of applications built using Qt (maybe Peter would know better)

I'd be happy to contribute and show you some iterations, and again, feel free to communicate however you feel they should be and i will do my best to translate that into something refreshing for LDView.

[tcobbs]

SVGs are good in principle but often fall apart at very small sizes (like 16x16). I won't say that you can't make them work, but I will say that I am somewhat dubious.

I did forget one more thing, but it's relatively minor: dark mode on Macs needs to work. For many icons, nothing needs to be done; they look fine in both light mode and dark mode. For some icons, dark versions can be created. Examples of this in the existing LDView codebase are:

https://github.com/tcobbs/ldview/tree/master/MacOSX/LDView/Assets.xcassets/Toolbar%20Icons/toolbar_bfc.imageset
https://github.com/tcobbs/ldview/tree/master/MacOSX/LDView/Assets.xcassets/Toolbar%20Icons/toolbar_fullscreen.imageset

I don't know how Qt deals with this; to the best of my knowledge LDView's Qt version doesn't deal with it at all right now, but maybe that could be changed relatively easily.