Ha! I'm for a bit of color! I don't find the color distracting because I see text as one thing and colored icons as another. I don;'t want what my wife calls a "folkloric" dispolay of every known crude, bright color, but I want enough color in the icons so I can distinguish among them at a glance. Not vast numbers of violent-to-the-eye colors, but just a bit.
The simplest case -- blue on bloody gray. Blue tabs. Blue Tooldrawer palette collection selection. Blue aligment selection... I don't know why psychologists have spent some much time on perception and information processing -- nobody takes a blind bit of notice of them (a bit like their work on education). And I don't know why I have bought a computer/monitor combination that shows me millions of color when I can't use them for speedy navigation. You want to be able to point and click quickly -- you need good differentiation and color differentiation is among the strongest ways to go. Having to stop and read labels -- now THERE's something that interferes with text production.
E.g. in the Tooldrawer -- put a bit of color in the top bar of each palette, so you can see at a glance where one palette ends and another begins. Make them a little bigger too -- maybe 50% bigger.
Get a bit more differentiation going -- e.g. in the Styles palette, the Paragraph Styles are blue and the Character styles Purple. Separate them more by color. Sure they have different symbols, but if the symbols are supposed to be the differentiator, why have different colors at all?
In the font menu -- I've put forward my views before. I would like a more colorful AND more functional display along the lines of FontCard. If you get color, you can link to it at a glance then search around it. Ion Idriess, the great Australian Light Horse sniper of World War I talked about how things that stood out a little would attract the eye -- asnd how his life was saved and an enemy sniper's life was lost through one little thing had become an anchor for the eye.
Psychological perception and information processing work has shown the truth of this stuff in more mundane situations.
Since the apparent demise of FontCard, what about an effort, Nisus, to produce a replacement for it which would substitute for font menus across both Cocoa and Carbon apps?
In the meantime, how about a more functional menu within Nisus Writer which allowed us to choose which of the Fontbook menus we viewed -- I would choose "Favourites" and "Recently Used" and nothing else -- and allowed us to apply some color to them or background color behind them so we could set up markers for our eyes to jump to.
"Allowed us to apply some color" -- that's the key. Some people don't want color; some people do. How about offering a choices or choices?
Best regards, Geoff
Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press
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