Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 2nd Aug 2009 20:12 UTC, submitted by kiddo
A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons. Menu entries, buttons - everything has an icon attached to it which often wastes space needlessly by making buttons larger than they need to be, as well as menus wider than they need to be. The good news (for me, at least) is that the next GNOME release will have all these icons removed.
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Member since:2005-09-10
Never display an icon and the text. The icon alone should suffice, if not, use only text. We don't need a bunch of weird icons, just text will do fine...
Well, saying "I think..." would have been nice instead of never do this or that... especially since what you suggest doesn't make much sense. For one thing, deeper into the discussion one of the developer points to some studies done in the efficiency using icons, text, or icons+text:
Jared Spool, amongst many others, has studied the efficiency of icon +text vs icon-alone vs text-alone over the years, and this post nicely summarises his findings (which ties in with other studies I've read, but this was the first that came to hand):
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2009/06/28/old-news-about-icons/
Note: 'text+image' in this context means 'an icon with a label', not 'an icon with a tooltip' -- I don't recall where icon+tooltip falls on the scale, but it's not at the top due to the greater interaction effort required to reveal tooltips.
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2009/06/28/old-news-about-icons/
Note: 'text+image' in this context means 'an icon with a label', not 'an icon with a tooltip' -- I don't recall where icon+tooltip falls on the scale, but it's not at the top due to the greater interaction effort required to reveal tooltips.
Follow the link to see the results yourself.
Second, the problem is that they try to tackle the issue on the wrong end. Text+icons are not the main problem, badly designed icon theme plus oversized widgets are.
I don't think I need to explain the widgets parts. About the icons, two things: they should be scalable, and they should provide visual cues beyond just form and shape. Actually there are three things... scalability, color cues, and visual appeal. (Oh bugger. Amongst our icon weaponry are such elements as ...
Again, sorry to bring KDE up, but that is what was done really well with oxygen - they actually designed it from the ground up in a holistic way. Take for instance the color palette:
Colors
“Since color has a very important role in Oxygen, a consistent color palette was needed”
Oxygen has one color palette with two parts (Figure 4). “Normal” colors have sober tonalities of the most needed colors. These are used mostly for mimetypes, folders, system applications and actions. Vibrant colors are more saturated used to emphasize important action icons on a toolbar, for rich media mimetypes, for application icons and, generally speaking, used when there is need to focus the attention of the use on a particular element, helping the user to find his way by following a “subliminal” color language.
“Since color has a very important role in Oxygen, a consistent color palette was needed”
Oxygen has one color palette with two parts (Figure 4). “Normal” colors have sober tonalities of the most needed colors. These are used mostly for mimetypes, folders, system applications and actions. Vibrant colors are more saturated used to emphasize important action icons on a toolbar, for rich media mimetypes, for application icons and, generally speaking, used when there is need to focus the attention of the use on a particular element, helping the user to find his way by following a “subliminal” color language.
http://www.oxygen-icons.org/?page_id=2
Now take a look at my screenshots I posted above to see how they look like. The black of save, the blue of help, the red of quit - all make these buttons recognizable from a distance, providing immediate access to the most important functionality. Not only that, but all icons are scalable - they look good at 256x256 while still being easily recognizable at 16x16. Tango on the other hand...fails on all 5 points I mentioned earlier
Member since:2006-09-12
I don't know if I would use Oxygen as an example on how to do it right. I find, at smaller sizes, Oxygen icons are WAY too detailed and any visual cue they might give is obscured by the visual blurring of these details. To me, Oxygen has no appeal, as the icons don't have enough contrast to the background and tend to only look good at larger sizes (+48px). Which is again lost on me, since I set icon sizes to at maximum 36px.
I think, this is largely a taste issue. Even with the most generic guide-lines, visual elements will appeal to some and not at all to others.
Member since:
2007-04-29
Never display an icon and the text. The icon alone should suffice, if not, use only text. We don't need a bunch of weird icons, just text will do fine.
All the noobs won't recognize the icons, and all the powerusers will use the keyboard shortcuts.
More icons does not make it more userfriendly, easier to find functionality does.