[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #23333: New icons

[WordPress Trac]

#23333: New icons
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 Reporter:  empireoflight   |       Owner:
     Type:  enhancement     |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal          |   Milestone:  3.6
Component:  Administration  |     Version:
 Severity:  normal          |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  ui-focus        |
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Comment (by johnjamesjacoby):

 Replying to [comment:41 matt]:
 > JJJ, by your argument we could never change anything aesthetically with
 !WordPress. It's true that things built for old platforms will look old,
 but for anything more complex than standard UI elements we can control
 with CSS we're going to have this "problem" and there really isn't any way
 around it besides locking in all our visual elements to the look we chose
 5 years ago.
 That's not really fair to say. It's more that !WordPress core has a
 responsibility to provide a stable foundation for the growing audience of
 users and developers. As such, we improve UI that needs it, and commit to
 keeping UI that works for which third party plugin authors are invested
 in. Locking in some visual elements has to happen. We're married to them,
 even if we don't love them the same as we used to.

 Top Level Menu icons and icon-32's have been the only UI elements that
 were *encouraged* to be unique by the core team. Deviating from core
 design cues for list-tables, settings-fields, and metaboxes has been
 *discouraged* for several years now, and often came with a public shunning
 at WordCamps, Twitter, blog posts, etc...

 Changing the core icons now, after years of UI evangelism, abandons the
 standards we've set, and punishes plugin authors for years of doing the
 right thing by taking away the one rewarding thing they could use to
 identify their work.

 These icons are badges of honor given to users that opt into using those
 plugins. They symbolize sometimes years of development time, all tucked
 under one tiny, expressive little image. I suspect plugin authors have as
 deep of a connection with their icons as you do with the !WordPress logo
 itself.

 Also, consider that plugin authors will need to include eight sets of top
 level menu icons just to keep up: regular, retina, silver, blue, old, new.
 Changing the icon style immediately doubles the work and increases
 filesizes because of larger bundled png's.

 I understand if my opinion isn't the popular one. I also don't contribute
 as much to core UI as I have in the past, so I likely won't influence the
 result or design direction as heavily as others in the community can. I'm
 appreciative of the opportunity to share my thoughts, and to have a
 friendly discussion about the ideas presented in this ticket.

 Replying to [comment:43 empireoflight]:
 > @jjj—App icons are a different animal; they are more about branding a
 product than anything else, and therefore should be colorful and attention
 grabbing. UI Icons should be vector-based (if that means "flat", whatever)
 like text; whether that ends up being SVG or a web font remains to be
 seen, but in the meantime these set the groundwork for that.

 Top level menu icons are the only natural way plugins identify themselves
 within !WordPress's administration area. They are how a user navigates to
 the hidden functionality underneath that menu. For plugins, hovering
 over/clicking those menu's has more in common with opening an application
 with new functionality than it does with complimenting existing !WordPress
 core functionality.

 > It's difficult to properly design and even more so to scale the old ones
 as they are currently designed. The icons I've seen designed in the wild
 are a mixed bag; unless someone is decent at photoshop, they tend to look
 muddy and just "off" and they're usually not properly scaled or aligned,
 shadows are wrong, etc. We need a style that anyone can recreate fairly
 well.

 It requires more imagination to paint with 1 color. Flat icons place
 unrealistic limitations on iconographers to only use shapes instead of
 using depth or details. If making icons easy is really the goal, I'm
 reminded of [http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm a quote about doing
 things] not because they are easy, but because they are hard, and because
 they serve to measure our best energies and skills. I don't think this UI
 change represents us, the project, or our energies or skills very
 effectively.

 ----

 Let me approach this from a different angle... Imagine updating to Adobe
 CS6. When you first open it, you notice there are 4 random icons in the
 traditional left toolbar that retained the old full-color look, and 30 of
 the stock icons had the new, darker, flatter style. The questions I would
 have, would be something like: Why didn't those 4 icons didn't change? Did
 I do something wrong? How do I get them to match? Is there special meaning
 associated with these different looking icons? etc...

 We need to ask ourselves: is this UI change for us, worth these possible
 confusions?

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/23333#comment:48>
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