I am going through breeze icons that are missing or reusable (and so far were re-defined in Kexi). Found two largely popular.

A small challenge: are you able to recognize meaning of these two icons?



I am not. Aren't they too clever/minimalistic? That may be an issue when buttons without text are used.

Ask your colleague or two...

Aren't they too clever/minimalistic?

Neither, but rather say "state" than "direction" (squares look static rather than dynamic)
I had to look up the meaning, dominatly looks like a bullet list and some state/mode of that.

-> Replacing the open square with a pointing arc or triangle and removing the "bullets" might be a good idea?

These are action icons, so perhaps expressing the final state is a mistake? Moreover again as with the checkbox vs radio buttons, the difference for 16x16 size between these and, say, "enable bullet list" action, is just a few pixels.

jstaniek wrote:These are action icons, so perhaps expressing the final state is a mistake?

For the beginning i'd say that the predominant issue is that they rather do not even reasonably express the (present or coming) state.
Expressing the final state is rather not a mistake (eg. compare the bold B) as it says "click here to get that".
Expressing the present state would only be feasible if they're directly used as an indicator (rather than relying on a toolbutton), but that's a casewise matter (and in this case irrelevant - the application author only had to pick the correct direction for the purpose

jstaniek wrote:the difference for 16x16 size between these and, say, "enable bullet list" action, is just a few pixels.

I don't even think that the size matters here - sorting (ascending/descending) has nothing to do with an icon or bullet or whatever the squares represent. Thus, as mentioned before, the presence of those items is simply misleading (towards "something about a bullet list")

Eg. this:


Tracepath arrows using the highlight (splas, key, i don't know) color to indicate the dominant item in the icon.

Monochrome icons would be a better fit for breeze, hmm? Kexi's current (oxygen or even highcolor) are as follows:


It's basically what MS have (spent thousands on user testing I heard, and users, well, know the meaning for 20th year now).

Even simple arrows without A/Z would be fine I thought, but then there's a risk user associate the arrows with go-top/go-end navigation actions.

1) Ordered lists, with an item starting at the bottom.
2) Ordered lists, with an item starting at the top.

1) Other items are above the selection in a list
2) Other items are below the selection in a list

Point is, they are for lists and stuff/items/documents/images/names/whatever that's ordered by a list.

jstaniek wrote:A small challenge: are you able to recognize meaning of these two icons?

I'd interpret these as "Put the selected item at the beginning of the list" and "Put the selected item at the end of the list", respectively. What is their actual meaning?

Oxygen is actually

MS btw. spends a little more on usability tests than "thousands" (you're aware that they operate by billions of dollars?) and yet, "They have no style" (--S. Jobs)

Personally I don't believe that the designers of the breeze icon theme should just seek to copy windows (there're windows icon themes robbed together on kde-look.org anyway) but seek for icons that work (and are maybe antialiased)

Libreoffice (no idea where it fetches the icons from) btw looks like this:

colomar wrote:

jstaniek wrote:A small challenge: are you able to recognize meaning of these two icons?

I'd interpret these as "Put the selected item at the beginning of the list" and "Put the selected item at the end of the list", respectively. What is their actual meaning?

The name of the icons is view-sort-descending (or ascending).

luebking wrote:Oxygen is actually

MS btw. spends a little more on usability tests than "thousands" (you're aware that they operate by billions of dollars?) and yet, "They have no style" (--S. Jobs)

Personally I don't believe that the designers of the breeze icon theme should just seek to copy windows (there're windows icon themes robbed together on kde-look.org anyway) but seek for icons that work (and are maybe antialiased)

Libreoffice (no idea where it fetches the icons from) btw looks like this:

LO uses the icons from Humanity or Gnome or Tango in Gnome/GTK and Oxygen in KDE.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also, in lieu of Kexi using these icons for whatever purpose Kexi uses these icons you can request other icons for the action Kexi needs the icons.

luebking wrote:Oxygen is actually

I mentioned the issue: it can be equally well used for an jump-to-end-of-doc action.

luebking wrote:MS btw. spends a little more on usability tests than "thousands" (you're aware that they operate by billions of dollars?) and yet, "They have no style" (--S. Jobs)

"thousands" per icon I mean And yes, Jobs and alikes extended 'form follows function' to 'form follows emotion'. But there are limits, so you see - they killed skeuomorphism, Apple and MS are semi-monochromatic/minimalistic now, so is eventually KDE and many newer FOSS apps or niche Linux desktops. Android seeks to extend this trend further and find a golden rule (material). Breeze borrows from the current iOS for example (see the KSnapshot icon). This is rational: creativity is about composing (that's based on what Jobs said

luebking wrote:Personally I don't believe that the designers of the breeze icon theme should just seek to copy windows (there're windows icon themes robbed together on kde-look.org anyway) but seek for icons that work (and are maybe antialiased)

I guess it's not "just" What's been accomplished with breeze gives a lot of emotion already. But ignoring the results of MS' research (minus style somewhere) is a waste.

luebking wrote:Libreoffice (no idea where it fetches the icons from) btw looks like this:

That's GNOME's Tango. The rest of sets in LO's: galaxy (default)/crysta/oxygen "rob" MS - they uses identical concept as MS. They follow the concept, not the style. As you already know I am not asking for following the style. And KDE's high contrast too but (interesting) uses 1..9 instead of A..Z.

The default galaxy set:
.

That said, MS Office 2013 has not only function but also style that's closer to breeze than anything I guess:



Rational! Who was first? You never know, who cares.

Uri_Herrera wrote:The name of the icons is view-sort-descending (or ascending).

I have an icon for sort-name but as you can see it is only for name and the main view-sort-descending you can use everytime. And as you can see in the text the icon view-sort-ascending you can use also for normal 22x22 pix size (as showing in the text). But maybe we can find a beater solution the A B C icon needs more love than shown.

OK, another challenge, what's this:






Move to previous item/page/record, Move to next item/page/record ?


Scroll down for the answer...















No, according to the filenames it's undo/redo.

And again, these icons are exactly 5 pixels height (4 with opacity, 2 with 0.5 opacity). This is how it looks a bit modern DPI:



I truly hope this is fixed... Regarding the above discussion, I am sure users' emotions would be involved but not quite as expected

EDIT: How it looks in Kate (4.x) - 'undo/redo' vs 'prev/next document':

hi

yes there was a thread about und redo and the icon was changed. the new one works good.

it is gold that you pointed out where are the not well known icons. monocrone flat icons are easy to make BUT the recognition in very difficult.

if you need New icons for kexi please let me know. i'm helping out at the icons.

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.