Comments on new icon set: II - Shapes

• May 12, 2013 - 11:03

SECOND PART

(the first part is here )

Shapes of icons

1) Some icons are wrong:

a) align-vertical-...: they were wrong in the original and are still wrong; for instance, the “align top” option keeps a horizontal ref. point fixed and aligns the top of the text to it; the text is BELOW the ref., not above as in the icon; same for the other. Also, they make full sense only for single line texts, so it would be clearer to have letters on them, rather than blocks.

b) Musical symbols: These are traditional shapes, playing with them make them ‘strange’ and then slower to recognize (one should not spend time guessing or noticing icons). Approximately in order of importance:

- note heads should be oval, not circular
- note dots should be at the middle of the head, not below
- hooks and accidentals have ‘strange’ shapes (one for all: 'sharp' is not a 'pound' sign)
- ‘bars’ in breve and longa should overlap the oval sides (the breve looks like a whole note between two measure bars).

Probably the music symbols as a whole should be more similar to the shapes used in the program, of course allowing for some simplification and 'iconification' (and also taking into account the different effect of light-on-dark with respect to dark-on-light used in scores), but keeping the general style.

c) Why “align baseline” has an italic serif ‘y’ and an upright sans ‘a’?

2) Some icons are ‘timid’: “bold” is not bold enough, “italics” is not italics enough (or barely enough); same for superscript and subscript.

3) Some icons are unrecognizeable:

- “Connect” looks like an GMO flower to me (or a Buddha head with rays going out; the old version looked to me like an elephant head, so the basic design is probably arguable)

- “Printing” looks like a bridge over an highway (perhaps because it is similar to a sign actually used in highways...)

- “note tie” looks like the note is emitting exhaust gas... (Euro 4 crochets anyone? )

- “insert symbol” looks like nothing to me; better using a real, 'foreign' but recognizeable character (like edh, or a Greek character or even simply an ‘ä’) than the "generic currency" symbol never used in practice. Also I would do without the ‘+’.

- “save as” is a concept difficult to visualize, but the current shape does not ring any bell to me. Suggestions?

4) Some shapes would be right, but assume a larger resolution than the 16-20 pixels normally available in icons:

- the difference between the ‘+’ and the arrow in “copy” and “cut” is barely noticeable

- the arrow in “flip direction” is guessed more than seen

- same for “photo mode”

- “load” has probably too marked features; this is a case when the ‘negative’ approach plays tricks: the black ‘hook’ in the middle does not necessarily looks as a separation between the two sheets of the folder

- I could not find usages of “instruments” and “format-style” but, should they be used, they would probably become undecypherable (if such a word exists!).

Again, thanks for reading! Comments, ... are welcome.

M.

Comments

• May 12, 2013 - 12:37

Thanks to Mirek (Tin man) for his work on the re-design.

I'd just like to add to Miwarre's comments:

The hooks for notes look a bit crammed as the length becomes lower.

I'm not sure how the one for longa should look in the toolbar, or in the score for that matter.

The icon for the tie should probably be more levelled, or it looks like a slur.

I'm not entirely sure about the icon for Note Entry mode, but maybe's it's ok?

I wonder if there should be a little more vertical space for the icons overall?

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• May 13, 2013 - 16:20

Let's just look at the screenshot of the new toolbar:
pic

The thing that strikes you immediately is the crude shape of the notes, which give the impression they were drawn by a 13 year old who doesn't understand the proper shape of musical notation.

Music notation is elliptical, not circular, and so the shapes of the icons should also be elliptical, and not circular.

The other problem is the uniformity of the line thickness of shapes, which, again contribute to the crudeness of the look.

This is partly down to the white on dark colour scheme - it is extremely difficult to provided successful antialiasing of pixels in a colour scheme that does not allow a sufficient range of shadow tones.

More work needed I think.

Attachment Size
NewIconSet.png 39.49 KB

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• May 13, 2013 - 16:37

Thanks for your feedback Michael but please keep it constructive. A sentence like "... drawn by a 13 year old who doesn't understand the proper shape of musical notation" is not adding any value whatsoever. Keep in mind that not everyone is joining the MuseScore community at the same knowledge level, in particular when one would be 13 years old. We help each other learning and only then we grow as a community!

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• May 14, 2013 - 14:11

Yes, in retrospect that was a bit strong - maybe I shouldn't have jumped into the forum quite so quickly after seeing the new icon set.

That was my knee-jerk reaction.

And can I stress here that I do appreciate all the hard work TIn Man has put into this.

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• May 14, 2013 - 11:46

Well, it looks like something happened quite quickly!

The Buddha head (aka Connect) and the highway bridge (aka Print) are gone!

There are probably other small(er?) improvements (the photocamera, the arrow in "Flip" and the "+" / arrow in "Copy" / "Cut" look slightly more recognizeable now; unless I'm simply adapting to the new style!).

The trend is positive and the reactions to suggestions very quick! So, things look promising: thank you, Tinman!

The major outstanding point are the shapes of the musical symbols. As noted in the first post, Mirek could get as a base the shapes used by the program itself.

Some simplification is possible (I understand that fitting 5 hooks in the size of an icon is very difficult), but this is a musical notation program, so musical symbols should be 'correct' and the style should remain recognizeable (anyway, Michael, take it easy! We will get there...).

The reduced range of thickness makes things more difficult, but there is some room: for instance the (almost) horiz. bars of "Sharp" and "Natural" can be thicker than the verticals without exceeding the icon size.

@ChurchOrganist: as far as I understand the matter, this is not a consequence of the bi-tonal colour scheme: between the current background of 80 and the full light foreground of 255, there is room for more than 20 intermediate shades clearly distinguishable one from another.

I'm not a specialist and I may be wrong, but I think the main limitation is resolution: as soon as a feature of the original shape gets rasterized to less than one pixel, it does not get thinner, but rather grayer.

Thanks,

M.

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• May 16, 2013 - 21:14

The last iteration of icons includes new musical symbols: a great IMPROVEMENT!

Now they look right and unmistakable. THANKS, MIREK! Also, the speed at which improvements come is amazing.

With these shapes, however, I noticed an issue I didn't expect (I know, I rasied the point of their shape in the first place, so I plead guilty):

Most of them occupy a rather small surface of the icon and some design features are (correctly) rather thin. Consequences:
- for many there is not enough 'white' to distinguish clearly among the various states (disabled, enabled, active)
- some features tend to vanish on small resolutions (for instance, on my notebook, I have to keep the icon size at 16x16 or they take too much screen real estate): in particular, the dots and the vert. lines of Sharp and Natural, but also the note flags particularly when disabled.

So, I would like to make this proposal:

*) Keep the current shapes, but make them bigger; this is easy for dots and Tie and manageable for accidentals. For notes, this could imply cropping the stems, which would extend beyond the icon size.

This is a quick and incomplete example, which could serve as a working base:

Current shapes:
NOT FOUND: 1

Proposal (only quarter, half, whole, breve and longa note shapes are modified):
NOT FOUND: 2

Extending the idea to the other icons at the right of note values should be simple. I still have not figured out how to manage the smaller note values though: fitting 5 flags was difficult with current shapes and would be even more difficult with larger note heads.

However, I think (and some trials confirmed my impression) that the gain in clarity is real.

Thanks,

M.

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• May 16, 2013 - 23:51

"Is it definitely not possible to increase the vertical resolution?"

Not sure what you mean by this: the icon size can be increased and decreased at will in the Preferences General tab and the icons will be scaled to fit the size.

Of course, the larger the size, the more detailed the features of each icon can be; the smaller the size, the less. If a feaure, say the stem of the flat, is scaled to less than one pixel, it becomes grayer and grayer (it is anti-aliased) and tends to vanish.

This is why I'm proposing to enlarge the relevant part(s) of these icons to occupy a larger part of it and to span more pixels -- or fractions of pixel -- at any given icon size. The con is that this might imply clipping some part(s) of the current shape (for instance, part of the stems in note value icons), hopefully without jeopardizing the icon character.

M.

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• May 17, 2013 - 09:18

@Thomas: thanks for the support!

Just to be clear: in my screen shot, I have enlarged only some of the symbols to give an idea without duplicating efforts on a matter which is not my specialty and which Mirek can handle much better than I do.

But the idea is to have all the musical symbols enlarged; I agree that 128th (and possibly 64th) value(s), with so many flags, might need some trick or compromise, but for the majority of these symbols there should not be significant problems, including most note heads, dots, rest, accidentals and the arrow in the 'flip' icon (and possibly also the 'repitch' icon, but I have not looked at it in detail).

(small detail: if the crochet rest is too elongated a shape to keep its shape features while still fitting in the icon height, what about using the quaver rest shape instead?)

Thanks,

M.

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• May 29, 2013 - 19:50

There has been a recent change to the 'Tie' icon, but I don't know if I like it.

Tie icon.png

Page 62 onwards of 'Behind Bars' says that the ends of ties varies position-wise, but it seems that it should go no further than the centre of the notehead.

Using MuseScore 2.0 Nightly Build (f48ed4a) - Mac 10.7.5.

Attachment Size
Tie icon.png 6.47 KB

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• Jun 3, 2013 - 22:52

Well, IMHO, Scott is right: the supposed tie symbol looks too much like a slur, so it is not correctly conveying its purpose.

I think it could be fixed by:

1) turning the whole symbol by 180° (I don't know why, but the 'abstract prototype' of a tied note is down-stemmed, for me)

2) starting the tie right over the right most pixel of the note head

3) include in the icon as much of the tie as it fits: better to have a truncated tie than a tie which looks like a slur.

M.

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• Jun 4, 2013 - 17:17

I don't like the new voice selector, it just eats to much screen real esastate and on my usual window size I can only see voice 1 and 2

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• Jun 4, 2013 - 19:02

One thing I *like* about the linear arrangement of voice buttons is that users may be less often fooled into thinking they need to use voices 3 & 4 for the bottom staff of a piano score, or that voices 1 & 2 would be stems up, voices 3 & 4 stems down.

I do agree that toolbar is becoming uncomfortable long, but I'm not sure the best way to solve that is by returning to the old arrangement of voice buttons. It seems everything is spaced very widely; there's plenty of opportunity to tighten things up.

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