Research and mockup design: Mypaint toolbar and icons

Published on 20 august 2012

I spent my week end trying to bring a bit of love to the Mypaint GUI ( Graphic User Interface ) and also renovating icons. Well , I'm not a developper, so I did only a 'mockup' a sort of picture simulation , nothing 'real' but maybe it will inspirate the developper(s). Why ? Last weeks on the developpement version, the top toolbars started to be cluttered with too many icons and informations :
Mypaint 1.0.0+Git top toolbar with all activated , takes actually more than 1500px width

...so, I started discussing the changes with Andrew Chadwick. Andrew is brillant, one of the 3 most active Mypaint developpers , and at the origin of the cute GUI of Mypaint 1.0 ( the drop down panel , the toolbar ) and tons of other great commit to Mypaint. Because I felt limited expressing my ideas with words , I decided to dive in a mockup, a complete one, full vector. Why vector ? because if the icons works on the mockup, they could be instantly usable.

*Download here my final ( for the moment ) vector .svg** 2012-08-20_mockup-Mypaint_final.svg ( license GPL , edit with Inkscape )

Here were my priority working on it : - Make the toolbar display all icons on 1024px screen large minimum - Kept essential shortcuts, removed more rare features, moved them to submenus. - Grouped icons by family - Blending mode : back to text ( note as 'multiply' or 'overlay' but a more textual friendly approach ), icons are too complex to design a blending mode. - Mixed of the 'Frame' modal dialog and the 'Background' modal dialog in a new 'Canvas Setup' easy to access icon ( symetry moved here too ). - Moved 'Circles / Ellipse' and 'Series of Lines ' to the 'quickbrush' submenu , with auto pressure graph.

My tool was Inkscape ( a FLOSS vector drawing program ) and the huge libraries of icons already made named 'Tango'.

Of course, feel free to do the same as me ; more brain = more ideas , and it certainly great to pick good feedback here and here. And now you have my *.svg , thats half of the work done for proposing good looking mockup.