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Re: Icon design
by molnarcs on Wednesday 16/Nov/2005, @16:36
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"You are obviously an idiot." Yeah, obviously.
You answered none of the points I raised, and your reaction is quite ironic in the light of your nickname and the fact that you're preaching usability.
I will try to describe my points more simply (I'm not an english speaker, so it might be difficult to understand me sometimes). So: whether an icon theme is consistent or not depends on many things, of which the direction they face is the least important. I refer you to my screenshot that I posted before. If you check out the 4 icons in the middle, odd one is obviously the kword icon - not because it leans in another direction, but because it has an entirely different color palette.
What you wrote as an explanation seems to be no more than good sounding but empty terms (brain-pattern-recognition...) and I eagerly awaiting your real answer to the points I raised concerning your techno babble.
My whole point is that icon direction is totally overrated. Yes, I can imagine certain circumstances when it is beneficial, or simply looks better (like mimetypes/folder icons) - but that doesn't mean that they are actually more usable or user friendly. In very simple terms, a variation in direction might help the users remember the distinctions between say scribus, openoffice or kword which have similar functionality (thus they'll have similar icons: see my example, there is pen and paper on each of them) but are completely different beasts in reality.
Your BeOS example fails on the point that, again, you overrate one aspect of the UI (all BeOS icons lean in the same direction) so much that you attribute the - admittedly legendary - usability of BeOS to this single factor. This is the least important factor in my opinion, and what's more, I haven't seen any solid evidence or theory behind your reasoning except the (silly) BeOS example and the fact that GNOME is doing it. Fine, and tango actually is not bad, but what makes it good is that it is less dull than the current GNOME icon theme - see the comparison on the project's page. And we know pretty well that the current icon theme was also the result of wild usability theories, which now seem to be discarded in favor of a new one (and I might add that what makes tango nice is that it is not very dissimilar to oxygen's less vibrant themes).
In short: if you come up with such a wild theory, and you keep shouting DO THIS BECOUSE USABILITY DICTATES IT, you better come up with some reasoning beside GNOME is doing it and BeOS ruled once. And don't call those who disagree with you idiots. Thanks. |
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