Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Icons – Google Fonts

fonts.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 190 posts

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#141

Post by mappu »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #16
throwaway3699 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?

I don’t care since the icon font approach is technically inferior to SVG icons: it’s monochrome only, whereas SVG supports colors and transparency. Icon fonts also suffer from a plethora of rendering issues across platforms because fonts are usually rendered with speedy display of long text in mind. It’s strange Google would invest in a years-old kludge tech.

Fonts can actually contain coloured glyphs now, originally for emoji. Although it does seem like a layering violation.

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#142

Post by legitster »

systemvoltage wrote: post #138
legitster wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to disagree. I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones), as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!). I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meanin…

It is interesting. I will need to check sources (Samir Zeki's vision book is amazing), but color detection happens way sooner in the v2/v3 region than symbol interpretation which is a higher level function. This is why stop signs are red, traffic lights are not icons (even if distance wasn't a concern, icon based traffic lights would take too long for human vision system to process). Evolutionarily, certain colors su…

But you can do colors with icon fonts! In fact, one of their benefits is that you can do context specific colors. So only have things be red or green when it's most meaningful.

I think the problem is in having all icons be bright and meaningful all the time - too much visual information can be worse than too little.

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#144

Post by legitster »

tablespoon wrote: post #137
legitster wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to disagree. I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones), as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!). I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meanin…

> I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones),... I don't think anyone's disputing that you can do colorful icons poorly, but that's not an argument against them as a concept. > ...as well as a familiarity bias (I like the t…

I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like.

I'm currently dealing with software that uses old style icons and menus and users just thoroughly do not understand the interfaces. The problem is that when every icon is brightly colored and bold, none of them are meaningful to the user. They all look equally important even when not.

We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to!

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#145

Post by micdr0p »

bckygldstn wrote: post #123
crazygringo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, I absolutely agree with you. I tremendously lament the fact that outline, color, and shading have been thrown out so now we're trying to decipher little rounded-box hieroglyphics based on lines being subtly different. But on the other hand, the problem is that icons took so much work to create before, and also because they had such a recognizable identity/brand they weren't easy to reuse. Now the ico…

FYI there is a setting in gmail that turns the mystery icons into text labels: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2473038?hl=en-GB

Thank you for this!

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#146

Post by ncallaway »

systemvoltage wrote: post #138
legitster wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to disagree. I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones), as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!). I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meanin…

It is interesting. I will need to check sources (Samir Zeki's vision book is amazing), but color detection happens way sooner in the v2/v3 region than symbol interpretation which is a higher level function. This is why stop signs are red, traffic lights are not icons (even if distance wasn't a concern, icon based traffic lights would take too long for human vision system to process). Evolutionarily, certain colors su…

I guess I don't understand this critique because with a monochrome iconset, I can style them to have the semantic color that's relevant at the time.

A dangerous or destructive operation can be made to be red, to indicate the danger of the action.

A primary action that I expect the user to do can be made a primary action color.

If the icons are _built_ with color, then I can't change the color based on the semantics of how the icon is used. If you give me a monochrome icon that I can style, then I can match the color to the placement and functionality of the icon.

So, yes, _in the application_ the icons shouldn't be monochrome. But in the _iconset_ I would generally prefer they be.

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#147

Post by greggturkington »

benrbray wrote: post #136
greggturkington wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content "trending_up" is almost useless, a voiceover will not interpret the underscore as a space. There are no ARIA attributes that link any of the text to the buttons.

It seems like the solution is to improve the accessibility tools. The information is all already there.

That's not the solution. The solution is adding the correct attributes to the markup. Attributes that are universally recognized and already work with a11y tools.

In this example we'd add an aria-labelledby to the button which references the span with the correct info.

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#148

Post by strokirk »

systemvoltage wrote: post #126
duckmysick wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apart from HN UI, pretty much every website and desktop app has wastage of space. By HN, do you mean Hacker News? Because it has whitespace on the sides (since the element has width of 85%). It still looks fine if you change it to 90 or 95, so one could argue there's wasted space there too. But I'm not that one. I recognize empty space has its place in design. And it's not a fad either. Pick up a book - any book -…

Books have a purpose for negative space on either side of the text. It's to allow you to hold it without obscuring the text. It is also to allow spine to be tightly bound. For reference, here is a good book that goes in-depth of what and whys of book design, it is hard to find it though: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Books-Practice-Jost-Hochuli... Most negative space on the websites is merely designers going "it l…

What's wrong with a design being clean? Normally that's high praise!

Re: Icons – Google Fonts

#149

Post by marcosdumay »

systemvoltage wrote: post #102

I am sorry but I am going to be that guy. Iconography has regressed so much, it's all the same optically to me. Designers keep pushing minimalism and line-graphics to "reduce crud" like its some sort of a religion. We can't distinguish icons well. There is no effort put into making them more unique and recognizable. What a horrible cult. Check out these glorious past remnants that we've forgotten about, they were so…

Ok, your comment made me open the site instead of just taking a glance at the comments and moving on.

When I got there, the icons were... actually not that bad. They have very diverse outlines (even more than your example), large features (again, more than your examples), and very precise meanings. Why do you say they are hard to tell apart?

The only thing missing is color and gradients, but that is for good reason, as hard-coded colors do interfere with usability and accessibility, and currently we have no way to encode color independent gradients (that's a huge oversight, by the way).

Post reply on HN