Sorting control

ale
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Re: Sorting control

Postby ale » Sun Mar 28, 2010 6:11 pm

I worked a lot finishing the project today, hopefully I have all the icons now! (which needs to be changed together). Below I will attach the final preview. On the first row we have the current icons. In the second row are the redesigned icons. If we actually put and look at them on the user interface, it's a bit different, they might seem too sharp or the "blue" is not really spot on, so they may need some adjusting, an example of such tweaking is in the third row where the icons are slightly desaturated and overall may give a better feeling. Everything is a bit subjective in the end...

Now... Alex and CN users! would you like to see a change? do you prefer the current icons? do you have other suggestions? feel free to say anything, really. And anything you choose it's fine for me :)
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Re: Sorting control

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Mon Mar 29, 2010 4:12 pm

This looks really nice! So, what do you do for a living? )) maybe it should be icon design))
To my taste row 2 looks best.
Just a few things that caught my eyes:
- I don't agree with the "plus" sign to mean "anywhere". It already has a very strong meaning as "add" or "expand".
This is why I think this icon should be of different color. And maybe asterisk instead of plus would be better?
- The size icon has something in the middle what makes it look like an empty glass;
- I kinda liked round handles of scissors ;)

But this is just me nitpicking)) The icons are great!
Alex
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Re: Sorting control

Postby ale » Mon Mar 29, 2010 9:58 pm

The "plus" sign was born because I found too weak the current difference between "anywhere" and "text and title". The shape is the same, the colour is similar so it's not easy to distinguish and remember the two icons. It was meant as something like "more"... than "text and title". It also has graphic advantages, it's easy and clean to draw even with a few pixels. But of course I also understand the problem you explain...
If we have a similar colour we need a kind of different shape. If the shape is the same we need different colours, more than we have now in my opinion. The reason that made me try a different shape was also that most icons and the interface are blueish so it was nice be able to mantain the style everywhere. But Ok, we can try something different or only different colours.

When I first saw the size icon I thought to a database, and the icon I drawed is similar to the icon usually used for databases. I will also try the monolitic look you suggest.

I will see if I'm able to draw nice scissors with rounded handles.

I'm going to sleep now, anyway tomorrow I will zip and send all the PNGs I have, so that if you want, you can also try them in the live application, I understood it's a very different feeling to see all the icons aligned on a white background or live in the application.

Well while writing this I tried the asterisk, it's not supereasy to do and it's very tiny at this sizes. I'm not sure I like it...
On a more abstract side I also tried a kind of top oriented and stylized arrow. Nice? ugly?
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ale
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Re: Sorting control

Postby ale » Tue Mar 30, 2010 8:45 pm

No news, but as promised, here's the zipped files of the project.
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Re: Sorting control

Postby ale » Wed Mar 31, 2010 2:25 pm

Alex, I tried my best to add new scissors with rounded handles and a second "size" icon. About the "search anywhere" icon, I felt you simply prefer a different colour but the same shape of other type of searches. But colours are so subjective that it's not easy to find one that you and other users might like, so I need your input. I actually added one as a sample but I followed my mood :)
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Re: Sorting control

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Mon Apr 05, 2010 9:25 am

ale,

sorry for the delayed reply. The icons are great. I like the new scissors and the size icon.
As for the "anywhere" icon, I'd like to suggest the following: since this icon is the default, having
it in some strange color is not what I'd be looking for. Hence I have the following idea:
leave the "anywhere" icon blue, whereas make the "text", "title", "text and title" icons greyish.
What do you think?
Alex

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