I generally agree with a lot of your points. Of course Krita should look nice and professional and don’t turn people away. I get why you mention that we shouldn’t plan everything for the most beginners.
I however feel like you’re dismissing them a bit too much - you’re pointing out that they will leave because Krita is ugly, but at the same time you’re saying that if they truly want to learn Krita they will put an effort if they encounter something they don’t understand. Won’t it work the same way with Krita’s ugliness? In my opinion both looks and the UX are important for the first impression. I sometimes get people rage-quitting Krita for one reason or another, usually those are related to missing features or usability issues, sometimes crashes.
In case of Blender keep in mind that they don’t only change the look, they changed how things were accessed. And Blender looked much worse before than Krita is now, in my opinion.
Because, at the end of the day, I think the difference in my conclusion and yours is that I don’t really see Krita as ugly. I don’t really see this as a problem to other users either - I do user support for two years now and while I get a lot of questions about audio in animation, text tool, tagging and resources, even onion skins, the main enemy of newcommers after we removed the W - wrap-around shortcut. I don’t really get any mentions of how ugly Krita is. I don’t really see it myself and users I help seem to view Krita mostly through what features it contains, which to me means that Krita’s UI is good enough to not distract anyone from the features. So for me most of those threads here are kinda discussing a non-issue. Sure we can make Krita prettier, but first of all, that’s a difficult task considering how nice it already is - nice flat design, in the default theme dark greys with blue accents, clear icons, and second, there are so many things that users ask us time and time again for.
That’s of course just my opinion, as a user (when I was new to Krita, it looked super professional to me and I don’t really see much wrong it in even now, except for some UX misfortunes here and there, for example Rectangle Tool Tool Options… that nobody seemed to mention yet ), user supporter (I don’t get many complaints about Krita’s look, while I get a lot of questions and sometimes complaints about features) and developer (there is so much to do!).
I am not saying that Krita currently is ugly. if no one touched it and left it as is, it would be good.
But with some tweaks it can make it obviously even better as I am sure you have seen around.
But if you compare UIs beauty I am sure there are alot better contenders around. And to choose between 2 programs that do the same but one is more ugly than the other, which do you think is more favorite for users? The one that is more pretty.
Beauty is a bigger factor for non professional users to not pick it up.
New users will find what they find what is there when they arrive.
If that was really a impediment, Blender(Free) and Nuke(Payed) users would have stopped using those programs long time ago. You know how many outdated tutorials sites are for those 2 programs?
well that is a bigger reason to stop. I speak in a “working as should” situation to make a decision when you arrive and work in it. I am using it for so long that I am used to it, but there are stuff around that still annoys me around even still. The icons on the toolbar / layers stack are one of them. But I did not even get to this eye as what I did on the toolbar did not fly.
I like this suggestion from @ccburton it is very efficient and modern. An eye like in blender is also cool too but I play SL and that eye icon is there for 6 / 8 years? A bit tired of it on my side. But to be shot down because of the dreaded “new users”… ugh… makes no sense. at least justify the reason for it to not work/like it other than “our user base is to dumb to understand”. That is a standard so high only a children’s book can achieve but even children’s book teach you that Cows go Moo. But then what is a Cow for a toddler when they never saw one? People and kids are not dumb and should not be treated as such if they are to grow.
Again I am telling you nobody denied your contribution. it is just that the development has some workflows and you have to follow it. it is not that you put some new icons on the forum thread and it will be in the next version of Krita. I advice you to carry forward the work and have a discussion. Some of the icons were good some were bad. but it doesn’t mean they will rejected outright. I don’t know why you keep telling that it was not accepted. Yes there were feedback and discussions on the thread but I didn’t see a merge request for these neither did I see any interaction between you and the current Icon maintainer @Animtim that is not how it supposed to be.
@tiar even guided you with step step things to do. At this point I think you are sad because we didn’t accept and put the icons as is, I may be wrong.
You actually made me understand it was something not worth perusing but okay
And I did not make a MR because the git does not work for some reason on my end, I followed the instructions given to me. regardles I am on another project now.
I believe in another thread you said that you tried to make the Krita icons Breeze-like. Breeze already has some icons for hiding/unhiding things that are modern looking.
Yes, I tried to follow the Breeze icon guidelines and reuse some existing icons from the set, though for some very specific things it’s better to have our own icons than reusing generic ones.
And also, for the layer properties icons in the layer docker, we use 18px icons (and as far as I could see, Breeze only provides 16px or 22px icons).
Hey just updated Krita after a long time and noticed this icon is the same. Just curious if there’s a plan to update it, or if the conclusion here is that the current one is fine.
), user supporter (I don’t get many complaints about Krita’s look, while I get a lot of questions and sometimes complaints about features) and developer (there is so much to do!).
but okay