Re: dia consistency (look & feel of graphical elements)

[Ian Redfern <redferni logica com>]

On Thu, 2003-09-11 at 00:06, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Lars Clausen wrote:
> 
> > Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 16:24:37 -0500
> > From: Lars Clausen <lrclause@cs.uiuc.edu>
> > Reply-To: dia-list@gnome.org
> > To: dia-list@gnome.org
> > Subject: Re: dia consistency (look & feel of graphical elements)
> >
> > On 10 Sep 2003, debacle@knorke.in-berlin.de wrote:
> > > Hi,

> > > Second, the "Cisco" elements look very different from all
> > > other elements.  Inverting all of them would make them more
> > > "dia-like".  Many of the icons are much larger (e.g. 83x49)
> > > than all other icons (22x22?), which looks not so good,
> 
> I very deliberately made all my icons the same size (if they are not 22x22
> then they are 20x20).  It was a rather time consuming task, the icons
> automatically generated by Dia are not square and the background is white
> rather than transparent, and the black lines come up looking a bit grey so
> I had to manually sharpen them up.

It's quite hard to make complex icons comprehensible in a 20x20 box,
particularly when so many of Cisco's differ only in detail. I have to
admit that I didn't get far in standardising the sizes - it's hard work!

I'm currently working on colour versions of the Cisco icons, and plan to
standardise on one size for all of them - I haven't worked out what that
size should be yet.

Of course, it would be wonderful if Dia just drew the shape in an
appropriate sized box itself, but as Alan says, getting a sensible shape
into 20x20 usually requires manual intervention. For an alternative,
larger view, this might be sensible.

I know the Cisco icons don't look the same as the other Dia icons, but
the shapes are very well known to network designers.

> > The Cisco elements were made automatically from figures published by Cisco
> > themselves.  They do look funny, kinda like they could be inverted and look
> > better, but that turns out not to be the case when you actually try it.
> > Try for instance with the web_cluster icon.

They look a lot better in colour, but I didn't have the technology to
convert the colour ones last year.

> > The icons ought to be resized, though some of them are going to be hard to
> > understand at that size.

Frankly, some of them are hard to understand at any size...

> Some of the icons will just have to be drawn manually if they are to be
> understandable.  Ideally the sheets would appear using a more standard file
> widget that way we could have icon view, button view (what we currently
> have) as well as a view with small text icons.  It might be good to have
> larger icon views like 48x48 but that would not fit well within the
> current toolbox, I think having the sheets in a separate dockable window
> from the main toolbox would be good.

With the current Cisco icon set at over 300, a text-based list of names
starts to become interesting.

I don't want Dia to turn into an advert for Cisco, but they have been
very generous to put all these icons into the public domain, so it
seemed only fair to take them as a complete set, rather than pick just
the generic ones. I'm happy to add others to fill holes (e.g. CD-ROM,
blade server, even Tux) if anyone has any suggestions.
-- 
Ian Redfern
Consultant
UK Telecoms Solutions
LogicaCMG
Tel: +44 20 7637 9111
Email: Ian.Redfern@LogicaCMG.com
www.logicacmg.com


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