ken300 wrote:FWIW I think andreas_k's suggestion is pretty good.

The only thing i'd change is to swap the 'A, B, C' to just 'A, Z' a bit like this:



I think that the one with the 'A, B, C' ordered with 'A' at the top is instantly obvious but maybe the reversed one 'C, B, A' with 'C' at the top could possibly mean put the 'C' items first. To me 'A, Z' more clearly says 'put it in alphabetical order', 'Z, A' says 'put it in reverse alphabetical order'.

What you do about changing the order of other non a-z lists i don't know.

Cool! Two letters are better than three in a 22x22 size.
PS: If it helps the three lines would mean records in Kexi, but this is quite like the generic list concept.

If only the top or bottom horizontal lines will have a letter to their left then you're no longer restricted to just three lines like when you had 'A', 'B' & 'C' you could have as many lines as you wanted. If anything it'll probably look better with 4, it's just how that looks at normal small icon size!

FWWI:
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- I assume 1...9 instead of A...Z is used because arabian digits are far more widespread than latin letters

- there's a strong reason why the MS icon uses colored letters - the glyphs easily become hard to distinguish on small scales (what's much more a problem w/ "ABC", since their basic shape is very similar) - the porposed icon falls short on that aspect by making the important information (A/Z for "sorting") artificially small compared to the nearly useless "list" indication

- the icons w/o arrows can still be easily mistaken as "indent to ordered list"

- the MS icon w/o context and background (don't underestimate your favor for a particular icon just being that you have *once* learned what it means) could just as well mean "generate an ordered list" (iow: you'll never do an icon that immediately says "this means soting up/down". It only must be good enough to be recognizable by the user to point the mouse there for the tooltip)

- afair Apple does nowhere really use such icon at all - it would violate the "action near context" concept.
Eg. in "Numbers" (Apple Excel), every header has a context arrow (since Apple doesn't like RMB clicks providing a menu where you can say "sort ascending/descending" - and popups are not cluttered with icons.
Some "far away" toolbutton that applies to "what? entire document? selection? column? row?" is actually bad GUI (i stuff my features at some place) - despite it requires one less click.

What about that kind of thing instead?

please when showing icons use size 22x22 pix so that you can see the icon in real size as shown in the toolbar. big icons are much easier than small ones.

luebking wrote:- I assume 1...9 instead of A...Z is used because arabian digits are far more widespread than latin letters

How about 1, 2 and 3 / 3, 2, 1 next to four or five horizontal lines then?

Reg. i18n and content agnosticism, what about this direction (googled




It says "smallest up" or "biggest up", with the arrow being a dynamic element.

If done right, the global shape of the wedge should be easy to spot on even minor sizes.

luebking wrote:Reg. i18n and content agnosticism, what about this direction (googled




It says "smallest up" or "biggest up", with the arrow being a dynamic element.

If done right, the global shape of the wedge should be easy to spot on even minor sizes.

I'd like them. I also want to make this. easy to recognize and nice for smal size. also universal to usw.

+1

Yeah, that actually seems like the best one.

Do we need both the triangular list and the arrows, or is the list sufficient?

I'd keep the arrow for the dynamic factor. Otherwise it's "just a list".

+1 from me:

* they'd be easy to recognize at small sizes
* they suggest sorting for all different kinds of lists (sort by number, sort by file size etc & not just 'put in alphabetical order') so they could be used anywhere

As Lubeking said earlier:

"you'll never do an icon that immediately says "this means sorting up/down"

- someone, somewhere will say 'it looks like it means 'x' to me instead!', but personally i think these are pretty close to perfect

I would leave the arrow in place though otherwise a lot of its meaning is lost!

ascending
old new

descending
old new

Would it work also without arrow?
ascending
descending

Just my own opinion, but having the arrows stretching the full height of the icon makes it crystal clear that it performs an action on the whole list and not just one or two of the entries in it. To my mind these quickly bodged icons convey 'reorder the whole list' a little better:


And I'm not sure that there is a right or wrong answer to this (I suspect that it's just down to your own opinions), but to my mind 'Ascending' would describe the higher value being at the top and 'Descending' would be for the other way round but i can see the argument for them being the way round shown in andreas_k's post too!

BTW - Apologies, never having worked with icons before, i tried scaling the above image so each icon was 22x22 & they looked all blurry & rubbish so decided to post them at the size above.

you can also post the svg file. and in the forum use [thumb=22][/thumb] to insert the image. 22 for size. The problem with the arrow is, that in the breeze theme it want be used for now. the arrow from my post was used. i can stretch it to the full size. but again please put icons in the right size into the forum because it have to look good in the icon bar.

Looks nice! Here is a small modification:




What I changed was simply to bring some randomness into the differences between the bar lenghts. I did this because in Andreas' version, it looked more like an outline of a geometric form to me than sizes of real-world objects.

And now I see that Ken did something similar. Oh well...