Unity

Bug #741804
Comment #12

Comment 12 for bug 741804

Revision history for this message

Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote on 2011-03-24:

#12

Vish: or your curiosity, Rosie and Otto were sitting next to each other this afternoon and that's the same timeframe when Rosie was designing the trash-full icon state. ;-)

Regarding grid-fitting, huge amounts of effort ultimately goes into grid fitting/aligning (aka "hinting") to certain pixel counts. Hinting is an optimisation stage to improve the clarity of what /is already there/ and so for something like UI Freeze the focus is instead to get the raw image there, and to optimise it later if needed. As an example with fonts, if we designed a font on a 8x16 grid we would have an excellent, labour intensively-produced (bitmap) font, but not something that was pretty when printed, or which it was possible to scale up to 9x17 pixels.

In Unity today, the Launcher is already a resizable entity. You can try it by going to CCSM->Ubuntu Unity Plugin->Experimental->Launcher Icon Size and moving the slider. In the medium-term this resizing is likely to correspond to physical size to fit physical dimensions such as fingers. If the movement causes the size to of the icons to need to be even 49 pixels or 51 pixels then any attempt at grid-fitting will have been undone and the result would have been a huge amount of premature optimisation.

When hinting line-art, icons or fonts, one tends to start off by drawing what is actually desired. As the density of screens continues to evolve it is becoming desirable to have a vector form available with that level of flexibility. We can of course then continue to work on specific (and labour intensive) optimisations of the general case for certain specific pixel counts, ...but the gain has to justify the work involved.

The gain is far greater when the icon form is known as a definite. Which might be something to look at next week, but having manually hinted variants isn't critical for UI Freeze, compared to just getting *something* on the right part of the screen, showing the intended shape before UI Freeze.

Vish: or your curiosity, Rosie and Otto were sitting next to each other this afternoon and that's the same timeframe when Rosie was designing the trash-full icon state.  ;-)

Regarding grid-fitting, huge amounts of effort ultimately goes into grid fitting/aligning (aka "hinting") to certain pixel counts.  Hinting is an optimisation stage to improve the clarity of what /is already there/ and so for something like UI Freeze the focus is instead to get the raw image there, and to optimise it later if needed.  As an example with fonts, if we designed a font on a 8x16 grid we would have an excellent, labour intensively-produced (bitmap) font, but not something that was pretty when printed, or which it was possible to scale up to 9x17 pixels.

In Unity today, the Launcher is already a resizable entity.  You can try it by going to CCSM->Ubuntu Unity Plugin->Experimental->Launcher Icon Size and moving the slider.  In the medium-term this resizing is likely to correspond to physical size to fit physical dimensions such as fingers.  If the movement causes the size to of the icons to need to be even 49 pixels or 51 pixels then any attempt at grid-fitting will have been undone and the result would have been a huge amount of premature optimisation.

When hinting line-art, icons or fonts, one tends to start off by drawing what is actually desired.  As the density of screens continues to evolve it is becoming desirable to have a vector form available with that level of flexibility.  We can of course then continue to work on specific (and labour intensive) optimisations of the general case for certain specific pixel counts, ...but the gain has to justify the work involved.

The gain is far greater when the icon form is known as a definite.  Which might be something to look at next week, but having manually hinted variants isn't critical for UI Freeze, compared to just getting *something* on the right part of the screen, showing the intended shape before UI Freeze.