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Originally Posted by gordguide |
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" ... I do a lot of windows development and it can be a pain in the ass to get the right set of toolbar icons that look consistently good together. ..."
I agree completely. What annoys me with many programs are icons that represent completely different functions, yet look <i>almost</i> identical. That collection was full of those very icons.
Probably some of the best work on icons today can be found in the Windowing Environments on Linux. Surely if the uber-geeks can do it Windows developers have few excuses. |
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yes that is always a challenge. But it also really forces you to think about layout and position of functions, something which is often left to the wayside by developers on all operating systems.
Similar looking icons are not necessarily a bad thing but (i.e. all you + buttons look similar except for background object: person, group, deal, etc) but when a process button looks like an object-adder then you have serious design issues. Grouping is paramount, people remember better when you break it down into digestable chunks. No one can look at an unbroken string of icons accross a toolbar stretching the width of the screen and make much sense of it. you need function-based or object-based groupings so people can visually iterate through the toolbar group-by-group and then icon-by-icon when they find the section they like.
That being said even grouping can fail when you have toolbar overload (i.e. Toad or even Visual Studio when you turn on more than the default set of toolbars. I try to keep my toolbar under control because if i have everything on the toolbar i need then navigation and usefullness suffer. Nothing wrong with menus!
Which of course leads me to ponder the new Ribbon in the latest office beta. I have not played with this but it certainly combines the Menu and Toolbar paradigm (essentially via tabbed toolbars). Im not sure i like it but I have only seen screenshots and not sure how that will transfer to user memory-mapping.
I love UI design work for better or worse
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