in the end there should be enough feedback now for developers to understand that the opinions are definitely a bit more than just nuanced here.
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using trendy words and believing in them is the real poison that tries to asphyxiate anyone that thinks different. it is like an excuse that keeps yourself from growing further.
being in opposition or having different perspectives or needs, is enough to become toxic. some may bring actual arguments others not, but even that does not prove that one is more right or wrong, let alone makes someone poisonous. only superstitious believes i am afraid.
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Better ideas and finding a solution that make more users happy require discussion. I’m pretty sure that the developers made topics like this one to receive feedback from the Rhino users. Calling some people “toxic” for sharing their opinion and giving constructive proposals is strange…
The ideas suggested here, such like themes and option to choose between icon packs (Rhino 9 style, Classic Rhino 7 or Rhino 8 style etc), were already proposed months ago (since Rhino 9 WIP was released with the new lime green icons) in several topics by a few users, but the “McNeel” team rejected them all.
My hope is that in the end they will take it seriously that the light lime green and reduced overall contrast and green outline make the readability of the icons much worse. From what I read, most long time Rhino users are perfectly fine with the classic blue contrasty icons and can’t stand the reduced contrast, removal of the gradient (replaced by low polygon-like look made via a 3 shades of the same colour), and lime green icons with medium green border…
If you directly compare those lime green (or cyan) icons with their counterparts from Rhino 7 and Rhino 8, you will realize that the former are much harder to distinguish and add to the eye strain in long sessions.
Also, many icons now are misleading, because cylinders look like octagons, for example.
I’m all for having options, so that more users will find the ideal icon style that suits then better. There are two ways to do so:
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Either offer 3 default icons styles to choose from (Rhino 7, Rhino 8, Rhino 9);
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Or allow a detailed customization of the SVG based on the category of accents in the icons (primary colour 1, primary colour 2, secondary colour 1 for the gradient, secondary colour 2 for the gradient, primary border, secondary border, accent colour 1, accent colour 2, accent colour 3 etc).
My thoughts on this topic:
Icons should be as simple as possible while being easy to distinguish from similar icons.
Icons should convey the function of the task/command to the extend possible while not becoming too complex.
Using several colors for icons can assist in readily identifying and differentiating between icons with similar shapes. However this may be of limited or no help to individuals with reduced ability to distinguish colors.
Color coding by type of object, type of task, etc in practice will have limited value in helping users locate a task/command. The users would need to have the color code memorized and then think about which color the icon for the desired task/command would use.
Options for the icon color palette are desirable.
Options for overall UI color palette are desirable.
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All the icons were unique in Rhino 7 and Rhino 8, so even a fully black and white UI was good enough to distinguish every icon from the others.
A colour-coded set of icons can actually reduce the ability of the eyes to recognize them due to the reduced contrast caused by both, the lighter primary colour and the washed-out coloured outline.
The washed-out outline od the icons makes the use of a slightly darker tab background an even worse user experience.
Many V9 icons have grey/black accents (representing the input curves, such like in the “Sweep 1 rail” tool) that replace the classic white accents form the previous iterations of Rhino. These darker accents don’t work well in most of the modified icons and forced the graphics designers to make the primary colour and border of the icons more washed-out. The dark accents also don’t work well with a darker tab background.
Hi Marika,
A quick audit of the R9 svg files generated with the _TestDumpSvgs command shows that there appear to be over 850 colours in use (not taking into account gradients) across the 1.3K images.
I made the suggestion that with a standardised and limited palette of colours (thinking perhaps six colours in each of the six groups) and an abstraction of the colours from the icons, it would be possible for people to generate personal icon sets that suited their eyesight. Patently, at this time we don’t have the colour standardisation required to facilitate the abstraction. Is colour standardisation on the agenda as the icon redesign continues?
Colour list.txt (18.3 KB)
Regards
Jeremy
Re. defining the palette and the topic of colors & UI in general. It was illuminating to appreciate the work that went into establishing the color palette in Rhino we’re familiar with - from the Icon style guide that @martinsiegrist linked in another thread :
^^^ The classic Rhino spectrum right there. (Even green exists!). Notably this family stays well in the realm of the “primary” hues.
One thing about that group is that the way they present in Rhino is a result not just of their values, but their proportional distribution and the percieved contrast and saturation is highly relative to background settings.
It’s easy to dismiss conversations about color as matters of taste - (and probably we evolved color perception relative to how things taste!). But there is a ton of science behind all of this in terms of infomatics and perception, UI, clarity and accessibility.
from the link^^ -
Personally I can appreciate the idea of color coding different groups into coherent families. One of the reasons I’ve rarely used the icons, aside from tiny-ness on big high-def screens is that the just all blur into a sea of sameness. The notable difference just aren’t distinguishable. So it’s definitely noble work that McNeel is doing to improve and advance the UI for all the reasons given - especially accessibility for new users confronting fields of inscrutable unfamiliar icons - refining the visual parse-ability is going to make Rhino a more approachable product for sure.
Like others here - I find a couple of the current color choices (the green and purple in particular) to be too intense, but the impact also has to do with the relationships, the spread a palette takes across all corners of a wide gamut that make it harder to hold together (and the twists and turns as described above) - sometimes just removing or reducing one element in a clashing cluster can let things congeal. I do note that the current choices seem to work better on dark backgrounds for some reason.
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Icon size can be changed.
Options > Toolbars > Size and Styles > Button Size, Tab Size
I use a 4K monitor and a size of 24 is better for me than 16.
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Thanks, good point - I just checked and on v7 (where I’m still working 75% of the time) they were set at “Medium” (boosted to Large to good effect). On v8 I was already at 24, but 30 is actually better on this WFH workstation’s particular larger screen, (hence also set farther back and easier on un-corrected eyeballs these days).
My anecdote was more about my early exposure experience to Rhino and how I think any icon based UI suffers a bit (ironically) from the issue that graphical UI’s evolved to address. That notion of “self documentation discoverability” - where unlike a command-line-interface where you had to read the data-book or help-file to figure what could even happen when a program was running - with a well designed GUI you could learn what a system is capable of just sort of poking at all the buttons. The idea works amazingly well in systems where the buttons have words on them. Remembering most programs being architect-ed like this in the 90’s. But - it’s inefficient and irregular with screen real-estate, words have different lengths and there are many different languages.
So we get little pictures to try and remind us of something - but with as many as there are in Rhino their identities sort of all blend together, for me at least. But (maybe due to early Autocad training), I’ve always preffered the CLI for most known commands - just less movement needed generally.
Someone up-thread mentioned something that reminded of some psych findings about how we don’t remember things in-and-of-themselves or in isolation, it’s all about the spatial neighborhood, local context, memory-castle type stuff. I’m sure having meaningful color groups will aid this contextual association, not some much as a memorization A=X encoding meaning - but a “that’s what this neighborhood feels like” thing.
But blessedly since McNeel is an enlightened company they provide all the paths, tabs, drop-downs and context menus and we all get where we are going by various routes.
Hi All,
Thanks for all these suggestions, that we are carefully following, especially since this is a work-in-progress feature. As you may have noticed as well, we will not please everyone no matter what we do. Also note, that all changes (removing, adding, changing location) has to be done with a lot of care as there are many parts of this type of change that go beyond what’s visible to us, as users.
@Rhino_Bulgaria - We have tried to take color blindness into account. We have 2-3 developers who are color blind. We are conscius of this issue internally. The hard part is that their color blindness comes in different forms. What we do for one, doesn’t work for the other. Change is hard as it is. Taking this into account, is a battle we don’t know how to win.
Adding a UI so that people can set their color preference per group of tools is ideal. We are making big changes to the toolbar system at the moment and this has all the developers attention. We will see if we have time and resources after that to add such a system to V9. If not, we will most likely include a set of V8-style icons in V9 for those who wish to switch back.
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It would be really nice to have the option to use a mostly blue set of icons (plus a few yellow ones for History etc) like the classic Rhino 7 or Rhino 8 icons.
Given that there are numerous types of colour blindness, it’s understandable that some people in your team will see the colours in a different way. The most common type of colour blindness is red-green (only the blue colour is perceived properly), further made worse due to seeing most colours with a weaker contrast. This immediately makes any washed out colour difficult to distinguish, especially if it’s lime green, light red, cyan, pink, lilac, light yellow, orange, brown (brown is actually dark orange). Colour blind people see the major colours easier if they are more saturated, i.e. close to their medium shade. Solid black outlines of the icons also improve the vision. A lime green icon with medium green outline is considerably more difficult to distinguish than a blue icon with black outline.
Here is a nice video on the matter. I can’t see the number 2 shown at the 0:48 minute in this video. Or the number 5 shown at the 0:54 minute. It’s game over for me after that very moment, because everything looks the same colour for my eyes in nearly all samples afterwards.
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Really appreciate that McNeel is conscientious of these vision principles and actively dialoging with the user community. Regarding color blindness and relative aspects of color perception, since the fields deal with personal experience, the language and terms used (“contrast”, “intense”, “washed-out” etc.) can be slippery and parse differently without some common reference frames. Towards perhaps more a concrete basis, I wanted to share a few more materials that have helped clarify some of these issues for me, and in the conversations in my own circles.
Notably - while folks with color blindness are the “canaries in the coalmine” so to speak - the same principles apply broadly to all human vision. We all have a finite contrast budget.
The bodies of research for computer visualization implore us to …
This site is a great learning resource from a team at the Texas Advanced Computer Center at University of Austin :
SciVisColor is a hub for research and resources related to color in scientific visualization. SciVisColor draws on expertise from the arts, computer science, data science, geoscience, mathematics, and the scientific visualization community to create tools and guides that enhance scientists’ ability to extract knowledge from their data.
… and this slide presentation from research scientist Francesca Samsel there :
… excerpt :
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I have a few questions regarding the SVG icons in Rhino 8 and especially Rhino 9.
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Are they based on layer, so that every layer consists a unique colour (or an SVG gradient) and type of object (primary colour, secondary colour, primary outline, secondary outline, primary accent, secondary accent, extra objects), making it possible to change any of them individually?
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If the above is true, what program should be used to edit the SVG’s, so that the layer structure and colour information will be properly preserved for use in Rhino 9 as a custom package? Bitmap software such like Paint NET support layers that are perfect for editing pixel images with individual colour per layer. Is it possible to edit Rhino SVG icons directly into Rhino’s viewport and place every colour in a separate layer, then export the scene as an SVG that could be read by Rhino as a native icon SVG complete with all colours and layer priority?
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Any chance to get a maximum resolution 32-bit (with alpha channel for transparency) PNG icons of Rhino, so that these could be edited in Paint NET and then saved as 32-bit icons with the desired size. Editing a small icon such like 24x24 or 48x48 pixels is difficult, because the low resolution is a huge limitation factor. Plus, editing extra large images (512x512 or larger) with anti-aliasing turned off (pixelated graphics) is much easier, because the separation between the different colours is solid.
Attached here is a custom icon which I originally made as a 420x420 pixels PNG with multiple layers. Then, I scaled it to 32x32 pixels to use it in Rhino 7 as a replacement for the default icon for the ExtrudeCrvAlongCrv tool.
PDN image (open with the Paint NET program) which resembles the capital letter “T”, representing the most common usage of this particular tool:
ExtrudeCrvAlongCrv.rar (275.7 KB)
Scaled to 32x32 pixels and saved as a 32-bit PNG:
An alternative version which I use in my Rhino 7:
The original icon for comparison:
I made the top white curve a bit thicker, in order to improve the readability of the icon when it’s placed over the tab background colour:
