Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fonts are not behavior. When the web was made of pages and style was secondary to content, this wasn't a problem.
Welp, that's changed.
But should it have?
Say hello to Octicons
81–90 of 140 posts
Re: Say hello to Octicons
#82Good idea, but, sorry, don't like 'em. Neither the execution nor the conceptualization. The execution is too detailed. Details, regardless of how pixel-perfect they are, do blur upon quick glance, and the more details there are, the more it looks like a gray blob. The execution is also inconsistent - why the book is 3D, but the rest is flat? Except for the coffee mug that is neither. The conceptualization is off too.…
I don't like em either, but they're giving me free icons I can use for my website, so I'm all good!
Does it matter if they're free if you don't like them?
Re: Say hello to Octicons
#83Is there a license on these? I poked around for a few minutes but couldn't find anything. Seems like a generally useful icon set for any web-apps related to software or developers.
They're for GitHub use only.
Re: Say hello to Octicons
#84What GitHub needs is a 'like' button, not new icons (so we don't have to `watch` projects we find interesting and want to somehow remember just in case - which results in thousands of commits and pushes (every hour) in our news feed we absolutely don't care about).
I'd like to see something similar to Ohloh's "Uses This" feature.
Re: Say hello to Octicons
#85I have Firefox configured to force the same font face across all sites (I love the consistency this gives me, and also some some sites are extremely abusive in their font selection) so this doesn't work for me. The "icons" show up as unknown Unicode characters. Not cool. This seems like the wrong approach - shouldn't characters have semantic meaning? It also doesn't seem accessible. Screen readers wouldn't know what…
If CSS and browsers weren't so broken and there was a convenient, semantic alternative, I'm sure github would have used that instead. Unfortunately icon fonts are one of the most convenient and compatible 'hacks' to render vector icons in the current climate.
In a perfect world you'd be right, or perhaps even in a world where IE hadn't held the entire Internet back 10 years.
Re: Say hello to Octicons
#86Good idea, but, sorry, don't like 'em. Neither the execution nor the conceptualization. The execution is too detailed. Details, regardless of how pixel-perfect they are, do blur upon quick glance, and the more details there are, the more it looks like a gray blob. The execution is also inconsistent - why the book is 3D, but the rest is flat? Except for the coffee mug that is neither. The conceptualization is off too.…
>So not to sound like a complete ass, here's what I would've used instead - a gear for preferences, a "power off/on" symbol for logout, a simple blank page with a plus sign for "new", some sort of inbox or even an envelope for "notifications". Just keep it simple and don't overthink
Great point, especially about using + for new. They don't need to abstract the concept of a repository, they just need to abstract the concept of the Create/New action.
Their users will of course know it means to create a new repository, rather than a MS Word Document, email, sandwich, or whatever, simply based on context.
They've gotten into their heads that they need to create a new design language for version control concepts. And perhaps that's true for the Fork and Merge buttons, which are actions unique to version control, but not for everything. Create, Logoff, Notifications, etc. are not unique to version control at all. Just reuse what everyone is familiar with for those.
Re: Say hello to Octicons
#87Did the watchers and forks buttons also change?
They just to just be an icon and a number, now I see an icon/text button. Also, I can't see a list of watchers/forks by clicking on them now.
Re: Say hello to Octicons
#88This speaks to an overall bigger problem with browsers, the need for a universal vector graphics format. The fact that designers are resorting to fonts to try and get resizable art assets is not a good thing IMHO.
Isn't SVG universal?
It should be but
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svg#Support_for_SVG_in_web_brow...
Re: Say hello to Octicons
#89Good idea, but, sorry, don't like 'em. Neither the execution nor the conceptualization. The execution is too detailed. Details, regardless of how pixel-perfect they are, do blur upon quick glance, and the more details there are, the more it looks like a gray blob. The execution is also inconsistent - why the book is 3D, but the rest is flat? Except for the coffee mug that is neither. The conceptualization is off too.…
It's unfortunate, because from a technical and aesthetic standpoint, these icons are mostly rock solid, and they deserve some praise for that. But from a human/usability standpoint (what actually matters), I agree that they are indeed a failure. Let's hope they're ready to use that technical prowess to iterate.
But from a human/usability standpoint (what actually matters), I agree that they are indeed a failure.
From a human/usability standpoint, most icons used in user interfaces are failures.
Not sure you believe me? Quick! Name five icons you often use in a piece of software you use regularly: your browser, IDE, spreadsheet, graphics package, whatever.
Now name five more.
If you’re like most people, you probably came up with the first five easily enough. Back, refresh, stop, home, forward. Save, print, bold, cut, paste. But by the time you were getting toward ten, were you starting to struggle?
Now consider that many of these applications line up rows of 10, 20, or even more icons, which all look rather non-descript and blurry at typical sizes anyway. Some applications have several such rows, some at different sizes, some horizontal, some vertical. That’s an awful lot of screen space for something that most users won’t use, at least not without doing the mouse-hover-tooltip-no-it’s-not-that-one-maybe-it’s-the-one-over-there thing.
Oh, and here’s the kicker: of the icons that do get widely used, only a tiny number are truly iconic pictures that are recognisable! A lot are just an arbitrary marker in a predictable position, and it’s that context that the user recognises.
Re: Say hello to Octicons
#90Good idea, but, sorry, don't like 'em. Neither the execution nor the conceptualization. The execution is too detailed. Details, regardless of how pixel-perfect they are, do blur upon quick glance, and the more details there are, the more it looks like a gray blob. The execution is also inconsistent - why the book is 3D, but the rest is flat? Except for the coffee mug that is neither. The conceptualization is off too.…
Completely agreed. The icons are not only excessively detailed for their small size, but also sit rather awkwardly in relation to the rounded-rectangle container. The top right corner of every Github page now looks like the notification area of an old Linux desktop with an amateur-designed theme. Every minor redesign Github has released over the last couple of years increasingly reek of "designed by programmers". But…
In addition they changed the private repo indicator so it's no longer a very obvious yellow background, but a single label that says "PRIVATE".
It was actually useful to have a very obvious indicator that your repo was private and nobody else could see it.