On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Matthijs wrote:
>But I have to agree with Glen: the icons in the File | New menu also
>are too small for this design. They are the same as the large icons,
>but smaller icons have to be stylished because you can't see the
>details at that size. Is it possible to simplify the smaller icons in
>the 2.0 release?
>
>Look at the icons in 1.1: the large icons have seagulls on them, the
>small icons *don't have* the seagulls. That's because of the details
>get lost at that size.
This doesn't sound good: I already think that the OOo 1.1 icons are
worse than the old StarOffice 5.1 icons, so much so that in my
installation I've replaced the former with the latter so I can more
easily distinguish between spreadsheets, writer documents, etc. (When
you look closely, the OOo icons are basically the SO ones shrunk down to
the point of inscrutability and then stuck in a generic OOo motif which
makes them all look the same.)
Icons should be simple and clear so that you can distinguish between
different objects. If they're not, there's no point having them at all.
(The same goes for toolbar icons.) To achieve this in a 16x16 pixel
space typically means the icons have to be very stylised and usually
boldly coloured, since differing colours make it much easier to
distinguish between icons. Unfortunately there seems to be a trend by
many software developers towards imposing a brand style on their icons
so that they all look similar, also to make them look "sophisticated"
rather than strident, which usually seems to boil down to using insipid
shades of grey.
As an example of good icons, look at the small file icons for the ACDSee
image viewer. They all have a "house style" in that they have a similar
form so you can tell they are all image file icons, but they are also
very simple -- simply two rectangles with the three-letter file type
written on -- and yet they are also easy to distinguish between, as each
file type uses a completely different colour for its central rectangle.
This use of extremely simple designs that share a common feature but
also have an aspect that differs strongly is an approach OOo could learn
from.
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