If you open up the Rhino WIP, one of the first things you might notice is that the icons look different than before. Over the years, there have been requests for color coding the Rhino Toolbar icons. We’ve been working on implementing this in the Rhino WIP.
Why did we make this change?
Rhino has an enourmous amount of tools, which makes it extremely powerful as well as very hard to learn.
Up to Rhino 8, the icons:
All had the same base color.
Had a different logic to define input and output geometry.
Contained a lot of detail.
Differed a lot from the Grasshopper UI.
This made it very difficult for newcomers as well as for existing users to visually identify one tool from the other and retain its location in the Rhino workspace.
What has changed?
Color codes
We developed a color scheme to distinguish icons per-object-type and per-task:
I noticed that some of the viewport mode icons in the top toolbar (such as Arctic, Monochrome, and Technical) are not visually consistent and don’t match the style of the other display icons. For example, there’s a house icon next to a bear and a sphere, which creates a lack of visual harmony in the interface. It would be better to unify the style to make the design look more consistent and professional.
Using a different color to represent a specific topological class is a great choice (Mesh, Nurbs, and SubD), aside from the “Smurf” light blue (I would have preferred the traditional blue color of Rhino icons).
In any case, I don’t understand why they wanted to make Rhino more similar to Grasshopper 2 and not the other way around. If anything, Grasshopper should be aligned with Rhino’s style.
I have never seen an orange ground and very rarely orange sunset. Green ground and blue environment were ‘obvious’ to me.
I understand the consistency requirements and that orange comes from sun (or lightning), but I caught myself already scanning the toolbar for ground or environment (which, previously, was instant).
IMO the colors do not have anything to do with the functions or categories, they are just a means of distinguishing one category of tools from another.
Just a reminder that 12% of the male population is colour-blind, with higher percentage being above the age of 40, which is probably the largest group of professional Rhino users (apart from the students). Also, most men see a limited range of colours, even if they are not colour-blind. It’s a different story with women who have a better colour vision.
As a colour-blind person, the new icons of Rhino 9 are super bad for me due to all the green, orange and red that are seen improperly, difficult to distinguish (I see most of these colours the same) and with a much lower contrast.
People at the age of 65 years old have a 50% reduction of contrast sensitivity compared to those at the age of 20.
In my opinion, Rhino 9 must offer a classic Rhino 7 icon style with mostly blue icons (except Explode, History and a few others that are yellowish).
I really appreciate the effort in making, finally, the UI more consistent and coherent.
I’m not a fan of this colors but the principle works also if 6 different key colors is a huge challenge for any designer but I can agree with the 6 category.
To me a size hierarchy is missing, modern UI have main tool bigger and nice tools smaller
My big Suggestions: remove redundant icon!
Do we need 6 icon for extrude flavors? With the new “Mac style interface” it’s easier to select the option. Do we need to have the same tools on both surface, edge, and surface tabs?
Last, to me, remove the tabs. My feeling is that are just messing up even more.
At the end don’t listen to anyone, nor me, and take bold decision
My experience since Rhino 3 has always been that I never ever used the tabs in Rhino and I felt that they are a waste of screen space. However I very much use the tabs in Grasshopper and I think they are very well implemented there. I don’t know why this discrepency between Rhino and Grasshopper exists for my workflow.
Hi All! Thank you for all the feedback and suggestions. Taking away tabs and redundant icons would also be my personal preference, as well as using size to create hierarchy @skysurfer.
In fact, we played around with these concepts in the process of the Icon Redesign. These changes are harder to implement than meets the eye, given Rhino’s eclectic user base. You can see the contradictions in wishes in this thread alone!
@marika_almgren Worked on bringing consistency to tool location where possible. For instance, you’ll notice that the Transform and Edit tools are now located in the same spot on the side bar for the geometry creation tabs (Curve, Surface, SubD, etc).
Note to all tab ‘haters’ - I hope you know that they can be turned off…
Go to Options>Toolbars and uncheck the Group: Standard Toolbar Group (16 tabs)
You can replace the top “Standard” toolbar (which will disappear) by checking the “Standard” toolbar in the list and docking it at the top. You can then save your workspace arrangement under a name so that you can recall it if necessary.
Grape - Mesh
Blue - Nurbs
Cyan - SubD
Lime - Transform, Edit
Orange - Rendering
Yellow - Selection, File
- The Print icon
- The Options icon
- The Sun icon
- The Set view icons
and orange environments 
shows unfortunate choice of colour (for obvious reasons).
What is the obvious reason for orange being obviously wrong?
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