Hi Michael. Thanks for the update. Just let me know when you're ready to beta and I'll start making changes. I'll look around for icons, but I suspect there will be a few which need customization. Let me know and I'll see what I can do about putting together and SVG master collection.

Hello,

MoI itself can be an effective part of icon creation workflow, it is a great way to establish and hold look and feel of assets whether representing 2D or 3D and to iterate designs quickly and consistently.

My following comments are simply my observations about the look and feel about MoI as well as a bit of workflow related stuff, not to be taken as law.

My guess is you have around a dozen icons that you're using from a stock set. If that is the case it may be easier to make those compatible with MoIs look rather than trying to make the balance of your in house icons fit the look and feel of the stock icons. It might be the right time to solidify the MoI "look" by establishing those guidelines now, it saves time and effort down the road and usually results in more consistent messaging.


There are some inconsistencies within MoIs icon groups themselves, e.g. switching between 2D and 3D within the same grouping, but those are little things that can be cleaned up without too much effort.

Workflow wise much of this inconsistency is mitigated by good use of labels, please do not change this as the default load. Some of these concepts are nearly impossible to graphically represent and for the user to find in the toolbar without a label. At any rate there is some strong evidence to suggest that as people use an application they depend less on the icon itself and more on the usual location on screen. There are some potentially confusing items, like the deform button and object snap actually being flyouts, but the overall grouping looks very nice.

I'm curious what sort of assets can be used within MoI? Are the icons RGBA and is there a standard size that is being used? Thanks.

Hi OSTexo,

> My guess is you have around a dozen icons that you're using from a stock set.

Yeah it's pretty easy to tell which ones, stuff like File, Save, Undo, Redo - these are looking kind of dated now and I would like to update them to a newer style if it's easy to do that. The main way that I'd like to do it is to find a new set of icons to license to replace these. It's better for me to find a packaged set because then it's possible in the future to use more icons from that same set rather than having to create brand new ones from scratch at that later time.


> If that is the case it may be easier to make those compatible with MoIs look rather than trying
> to make the balance of your in house icons fit the look and feel of the stock icons.

Yeah I'm just looking to update those particular icons, I am not looking to change most of the ones on the side pane that I made myself, those are fine as-is.


> There are some inconsistencies within MoIs icon groups themselves, e.g. switching between
> 2D and 3D within the same grouping, but those are little things that can be cleaned up
> without too much effort.

That's true, but I would see that as a purely cosmetic issue and so it has a low priority. I don't see how having a mix of 2D/3D icons really has any impact on usability itself which is what I place by far the most emphasis on.


> Workflow wise much of this inconsistency is mitigated by good use of labels,
> please do not change this as the default load.

Certainly I won't be changing that - the labels are a crucial aspect for usability. I'd be more likely to remove the icons and have text only than to remove the labels and have icons only. One of the main purposes of the icons is just to take up space to make the buttons a nice big fat squarish shape to target more easily.


> I'm curious what sort of assets can be used within MoI? Are the icons RGBA
> and is there a standard size that is being used?

All the icons are 32-bit PNG files with alpha channel. The standard size for the images is 64x64, which gets scaled on demand either up or down (usually down) to match the current button size. The button size in the UI is dependent on the current UI font size which can be dynamically changed under Options > General > "UI Size".

- Michael

Michael,
Have you looked at the axialis stuff?

Hi Burr,

> Have you looked at the axialis stuff?

Just briefly, but they looked pretty good. I haven't spent much time yet looking around in detail yet.

- Michael

Hello Michael,

Thanks for the info, I suppose it would have made sense for me to look in the icons folder in MoI.