Hello!
I thought of a couple of additions to the current pop-up palette that I think could improve the experience! I've checked the Bug Tracker and what others have suggested there




Icon Resizing
This is possibly a bug that I should file a report about, but for now I'll just roll with it. The way the circle of Brush Presets currently adjust themselves around the Color Selector when their number increases is a bit impractical. It creates a lot of dead space while the actual features of the UI become small and somewhat difficult to accurately navigate. Specifically the Color Picker and the Brush Presets. In the picture above I drew up how I would like for things to scale instead, which allows for the elements inside of the Rotation Control to use up as much of the space as possible. The Brush Preset icons will remain as large and clear as possible, and the larger Color Picker in the middle allows for more precise selection of color.




"Orbital" Color History
I'd like for the Color History to be placed to the side of the Pop-Up Palette circle, "orbiting" it for a short distance. The colors would be ordered chronologically as well. In the illustration above I "anchored" the most recent color to just below the current foreground and background colors, as that seemed to make the most sense. As more colors are used to draw, they get added at the top of the history while the older ones get pushed towards the bottom of the circle counter-clockwise. Naturally, the list would stop before it collided with the UI elements at the bottom of the circle. This would also allow for the Color Picker at the center of the Pop-Up Palette to be larger and make selecting colors more precise.


Other Ideas
Another idea I saw and support is to add a quick way to zoom to Fit-Page. Something similar to the drop-down menu in the Overview docker would be very handy. Though I suppose that a drop-down menu would take up a lot of vertical space and easily end up stretching off-screen.

I would also like to state my opinion on the icon used for the Canvas Only mode button, because I feel like it should have a more conventional Full-Screen icon, such as or

I like the idea for the color history. On the opposite side it would be cool to have a color palette in that same fashion for a set of fixed colors as well.

Edisto wrote:I like the idea for the color history. On the opposite side it would be cool to have a color palette in that same fashion for a set of fixed colors as well.

I would love more quick access to a preset palette on the Pop-Up Palette, but there are three things that I think might be problematic. The first thing would be that having another an almost identical looking "Orbital Colors element" might end up being a bit confusing. I could be wrong about that though! The second thing is that, in my experience, with palettes like that you usually want a larger number of colors added to it. I'm wonder if 9 or so colors be enough for people to find it useful? And finally, there's the question of screen space, since the right side of the Pop-Up Palette holds the Quick Settings panel.

I'd love it if we could work out these concerns somehow though!

kapyia wrote:I would love more quick access to a preset palette on the Pop-Up Palette, but there are three things that I think might be problematic. The first thing would be that having another an almost identical looking "Orbital Colors element" might end up being a bit confusing. I could be wrong about that though! The second thing is that, in my experience, with palettes like that you usually want a larger number of colors added to it. I'm wonder if 9 or so colors be enough for people to find it useful? And finally, there's the question of screen space, since the right side of the Pop-Up Palette holds the Quick Settings panel.

I'd love it if we could work out these concerns somehow though!

I only use about 2-5 fixed colors. Blending can introduce more but that technically would be handled by the color history on the left not to mention color sampling. The palette could go along the top I think to avoid the popups. Or from that dead space mentioned earlier, could the color palettes be aligned inside there?

Actually now that I'm thinking about that dead space might be the perfect space for the color palette. Then you can have many layers like a crayon box and fit an entire palette. In a circular fashion of course.

Edisto wrote:Actually now that I'm thinking about that dead space might be the perfect space for the color palette. Then you can have many layers like a crayon box and fit an entire palette. In a circular fashion of course.

The dead space only appears when you have over 10 Brush Presets in the Pop-Up Palette, though. I think now is a point we reach where you and I want different things for our Pop-Up Palette
A Colour Palette element would be nice, and I know a lot of artists who'd make good use of it. Personally, though, I'd be willing to sacrifice that for a larger Color Picker in the center, since I usually pick my colors manually and would like to be able to be more precise with it. I guess it comes down to how you work with colors.

It would be easy to turn to the solution of making the entire Pop-Up Palette modular and customizable, but I believe that's requesting a lot from the Devs. I'm sure they have other things they'd rather work on.

Maybe you could have a small selection of different Pop-Up Palettes that target different types of artists or workflows (cartoonist, painterly, animator, ink only, etc.)?
Maybe it's an idea to have different Pop-Up Palettes that were accessed by Ctrl + R. Click, Shift + R. Click and Alt + R. Click?