icons is the next big thing for blender

hello every one, ive been using Blender for some time, for actual jobs as i mainly work on Photoshop and illustrator, and in many situations i find that i need to create things in 3d, and so i use blender for that, i love this program, and i was mostly impressed with the materials editing using nodes and the cycles rendering, also i love the non overlapping UI of blender, the way its made that you only need to split windows and choose the editor you need instead of using dialog boxes that block your view is really brilliant,

but now to get to the point, i think many people agree that the UI need some improvements, and from my experience, i felt that the program expect from you that you memories all the shortcuts that you need, and here is the thing, most of the people cant do that, and so most of us try to find the command that they need in the menus, and here comes another problem, the commands are not organized very well, and many times i find my self wasting minuets just searching for the tool or command that i know it exist but i cant find it, and while searching for that command that i need i find my self opening menus and then reading the text of every command in that menu hopping to finally find what i want

and so my proposal is to add Icons to every single command in blender,

i think just adding this icons will increase not only the usability but also equally the friendless of blender, opening blender and be greeted with colorful icons is not just inviting, but also your brain will be able to remember the positions of all the command that you need, and your eyes will guide you to the sections that you need unconsciously, you will not feel the need to read the text of every command before you click it,

so what do you think about this proposal, do most of the people here agree with this, and does experienced and beginner people think differently regarding this issue ?

Who’s going to design all those icons?
Will they stick around to design more icons for future features?
What happens when someone codes a new tool, but no one is available to make an icon?
Wouldn’t that make the menus and toolbars bigger to accommodate all those icons?

1 - this is the easiest thing to do, there is thousands of people who is willing to do such things, vector designing is not that hard, its very simple, if you found people to code cycles, then surely designing icons is a breath in comparison

2- you dont need the people to stick around for future features, different people can make new or adjust existing icons

3- he can stick it without an icon, or put a standard general one untill he can make a suitable icon

4- no, the icons can be very small, imagine it like this example: let say we have the command “copy” after adding the icon it will become like this “:wink: copy” this is an unmentioned space

I don’t think any icon past translate,scale and rotate

would make any sense

Cinema 4D tried it

non of the icons are really that memorable

One word, trueSpace.

are you kidding, cinema 4d is known to be the easiest program to use among 3d softwares,

No this is in fact not the “easiest thing to do”. As many people are “willing” to code Cycles very few have the skill to pull it off. I only know of 4-5 people who have ever gotten patches for Cycles in trunk (including the core developers) and it is the same with icon designers.

Yes you do. Just because people may know how to use a vector-drawing program does not make them good UI/icon designers and varying skill makes it difficult to match up different icon sets. If icons started to look even slightly different for different parts of the UI Blender as a whole will look bad.

This is pretty much what has happened already. There’s only one icon designer for Blender currently who can’t make icons for every single new tool.

Not replacing the word with the icon but adding it before the word will only take up more space in the UI and pretty much negate the point of icons.

Blender development is not easy. Saying stuff like “anyone can do it” is very disrespectful to the developers who work hard on ensuring that Blender is a stable and usable 3D software. It is also completely wrong as evident by the hundreds and hundreds of patches that have been rejected through the years and the hundreds of UI improvement “suggestions” that has been discarded.

interesting program, I searched for screen shots of it on Google and while it’s look a little bit childesh and non professional, but still it shows how much the icons helps you to pick the tool you want with out turning into proof reading mode, reading every command until you find what you want

I like text buttons. I can certainly read text faster than identify icons. You can keep your icons.

Hi Ninthjake, I don’t know what you are talking about, how could you compare coding cycles to making icons ?, icons are very easy to do, I work in advertising and I made many icon sits, and I say you need two people, they will be able to make all the icons for the program if they work full time, I think having a month, they will come up with most of the icons needed,

also of course before they even start making the icons, they will agree on a fixed guidelines for the icons and they might write a manual for it deciding the colors to be used in any icon, the style … etc, and so any one who will work on making this icons in the future, he will have to read the manual first and apply it

you missed the point here, the text will still be there, the icon will be added for more ease of use, as visual shapes combined with the text is easier to work with

If the text is still there, what’s the point of icons? The UI is cramped as it is.

Also, citation needed on that ‘visual shapes combined with text’ argument. It may work in advertising, but I seriously doubt anyone made such a study in the context of industry professionals and UI for highly technical, highly abstract software.

icons does not clutter the UI, in fact it’s the best tool to organise the UI, it give structure and personality, most of the programs out there use it,

look at the shot of Photoshop, I can count about 40 icons in there


Can confirm it is very very easy to learn(to the point where it makes up terminologies)

But it’s not because of the icons

Is it that time of year again, the old icon versus text versus shortcut ‘discussion’
The sense of deja vu is strong today

more icons? no thx! blender already has too many useless crappy icons

here’s a screen of the most useless icons in blender…


quite useless aren’t they?

in 98% of all cases text is better

OK guys you convinced me, i think we should get rid of the icons, might as well stop using shitty mouse and keyboards and carve our objects in woods and stones like the cave people

No citation? Oh, well, carry on then.

Anything that keep your pointer on the centre of interest and leaves a clutter free workspace. The future of computing is with tablets. Working with clunky old interfaces that take up screen real estate is not the way forward.
The future has almost arrived, we’re kind of in a transitional stage with technology atm as chips are being shrunk and optimised, looking back at apps like PS or Cinema for inspiration is definitely not the way forward.

@Maa

Or or

Leave everything the way they are

Seriously there’s nothing wrong with the current layout