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Usability for icon-editing

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Usability for icon-editing Thomas W 19 Sep 05:50
  Usability for icon-editing Akkana Peck 19 Sep 18:21
Thomas W
2013-09-19 05:50:34 UTC (over 10 years ago)

Usability for icon-editing

Here are some usability points which I commonly notice during icon-editing.

1) Icons open at 100% view, which is tiny in the window & far smaller than what I want for working at. This always requires two steps -- increase magnification, and then drag the window larger. Not very optimal workflow I don't think.

2) Brush defaults to 20px tapered-circle. For 16x16 icons, does it really make sense to always default to such a brush?

3) Not very easy to test icons. There's no quick way to get rid of the selection border, layer borders & background checks to view the overall tonality & see how it looks against a white background.

4) Feature idea: Especially nice would be the ability to view & test icons, or transparency in general, by dragging it against a white/ and variegated background (or over the whole desktop) with a range of zoom levels from 100 - 400%.

5) Exporting the icon: do I have to choose PNG options each time? As I understand it, PNG is a lossless format. Options might be valuable for JPEG sometimes, other times some standard presets would be fine.. But for 600-byte PNG files picking some defaults once would be sufficient for me. Every time after that it comes up, it kinda seems just like an unnecessary step.

Perhaps icon-editing is a little bit different from the "photographic editing" usecase, but it's quite common. Does anybody else find areas where GIMP could support the user/ workflow better? Suggestions welcome.

Regards Tom

Akkana Peck
2013-09-19 18:21:22 UTC (over 10 years ago)

Usability for icon-editing

Thomas W writes:

1) Icons open at 100% view, which is tiny in the window & far smaller than what I want for working at. This always requires two steps -- increase magnification, and then drag the window larger.

You might want to change the preference "Resize window on zoom" in the Preferences window under "Image Windows". It will eliminate the second step.

3) Not very easy to test icons. There's no quick way to get rid of the selection border, layer borders & background checks to view the overall tonality & see how it looks against a white background.

You know about the items in the View menu, right? And if you do View->New View, you can turn off all that visual clutter in one view while leaving it on in the other. You can also have a view that shows you the icon at actual size, while you work on another view with a high zoom.

4) Feature idea: Especially nice would be the ability to view & test icons, or transparency in general, by dragging it against a white/ and variegated background (or over the whole desktop) with a range of zoom levels from 100 - 400%.

That would be nice. I test transparent images by having a white or colored background that I turn on or off as I edit the image, but having a way to do that without making an extra layer would be useful.

You can test against the current desktop, even with transparency, using Filters->Animation->Playback, then click the Detach button and drag the image to the desktop. It would be nice if this feature wasn't so hidden, since it's very useful for non-animated images but no one is likely to discover it where it is without being told.

Perhaps icon-editing is a little bit different from the "photographic editing" usecase, but it's quite common. Does anybody else find areas where GIMP could support the user/ workflow better? Suggestions welcome.

I've found GIMP to be an excellent tool for what little icon editing I've done, mostly because of its multiple views.

...Akkana