Monday, July 22, 2013

Ribbon Icons

Without pointing fingers, there are some pretty ugly icons out there! I wonder if the people who made these icons realise that in the SDK, Autodesk supply a PDF titled Autodesk Icon Guidelines.




The guidelines go into quite a bit of detail describing things like colours, lighting and shadows. I can imagine if you were a professional icon artist the document would be very useful. I'm obliviously not a professional graphic artist nor do I have the tools of one, but to create good looking icons is easy!

To create my icons I normally take a screen shot of an existing Revit icon then modify it by adding badges or ascents as appropriate. This can all be done using built-in windows tools like snip and  paint.

The end result is icons that have the same look and feel as the Autodesk ones, but more importantly convey to the user the intention of the tool. I like to think without reading the name of the tool, users have an idea of what the tool does.  




You can get your hands on the Guidelines via the SDK download here:

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