Dev:Source/UI/Icon Guidelines

Colour

Currently there is no 'official' base palette for Blender's icons. I propose that we adopt Tango's palette, at the very least for the benefits listed here. As mentioned on their page, using this palette doesn't mean that all the icons will be those colours, but at least starting from them as a base, and then adjusting brightness, saturation, etc can help a lot to keep things looking consistent and unified.

Blender should be restrained in its use of colour. The Blender interface should be subdued, professional looking, and its icons not distracting from the graphical content that a user is creating. Blender icons should not use many colours within the same icon, neutral with one or two highlight colours depending on context.

We can divide up different colour schemes based on the type of icon and what it represents:

Icon Usage	Example	Colour
UI controls	Menu checkmark indicators, disclosure triangles	Black and white/greyscale
Selected data	3D View mesh selection mode buttons	Orange
Added data/geometry	Potential editing tools (no icons for these at present)	?
Window types	Window type menu items	?
Datablock types	Outliner/OOPs icons	?
Modes	Mode icons in 3D view header	?

See more on general colour meaning in Blender here: http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/ColourMeaning

Metaphors

Current (2.43) Blender icons that have ambiguous/unclear metaphors include:

• Scripts (snake icon)
• Pose Mode (smiling face)
• 3D View (a 2d grid)
• NLA Editor (stacked lines)
• Lock camera to scene (padlock - doesn't communicate anything about cameras)
• Update windows automatically (padlock)
• Outliner (upside down triangle made of squares)
• UV Face select mode (triangle on square)
• Vertex Paint and Texture Paint (brushes on squares - they don't communicate their functional differences)
• Vertex groups (black circle)
• Camera data (an eye - wouldn't some kind of camera icon be better? :)
• Buttons window (two rectangles)
• Curve node zoom in and out (plus and minus - should be more related to zooming, plus and minus can be easily confused with adding and removing curve points)
• Limit selection to visible (cube - totally ambiguous meaning)

--Matt Ebb