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As I hinted at previously we were close to sharing with you in our last post that scrollbars will be custom themed within both the light and dark themes. One of the most common requests for dark theme enhancements has been for us to theme scrollbars.
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You are free to take full advantage of the easy theme-ability and resize-ability of these assets within your own applications. For example the same glyph can easily be rendered in a size and format appropriate for use in different Visual Studio 11 contexts such as the Solution Explorer or the New Project Dialog.Īs a part of the Visual Studio 11 overall release plan we will be making all of the icons for this release available to you in multiple file formats including vector. All of our Visual Studio 11 icons are maintained in an icon repository as vector graphic files which we output in various file formats and sizes as needed within our products. In addition to being simpler in form, and being better suited to dynamic theming, glyph style icons also lend themselves to much cleaner resizing or scaling. The difference between the traditional outline based approach we used for beta and RC, and the approach we employee for RTM, is readily apparent in the following screenshots. The luminosity match makes the background and outline of icons disappear as it matches the surface color they are displayed on. The same happens on the light theme, as icons are displayed on differently shaded backgrounds. For the dark theme, this essentially inverts the brightness of the icon, making dark areas of the original icon light and light areas of the original icon dark. At runtime, we modify the luminosity of the raster images to match the outline of the icon with the background on which it is drawn and to make the fill and accent colors stand out effectively. In the RTM version, we dynamically adjust the icons according to the theme, resulting in icons that are cleaner and better matched to the theme and background color. The disadvantage of this approach is that it makes the icons appear fuzzy on both themes and too bright in the dark theme. In Beta and RC we used a ghost outline around the icons to make them visible on both lighter and darker backgrounds. As we looked into this approach we found it still didn’t allow us to optimize across the various backgrounds on which the icons would be hosted in each theme. We considered the pros and cons of outputting separate complete sets of swappable icons for each theme.
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This presents an interesting challenge in terms of how to most effectively host these icons in different themes, and on different shaded backgrounds (tool windows, editors, drop-downs). This approach improves consistency as we produce the approximately 6000 icons of various sizes and formats that are used in approximately 28,000 different locations throughout the product.
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In Visual Studio 11, we generate our icons from a common library of glyphs. Secondly the color palette we employ within the icons has been simplified and made much more consistent. The first is that the icons are generally much simpler or more symbolic in their form. In this post, I’d like to share what you will see in RTM and call out some of the dark theme improvements we’ve made from beta to RC and subsequently to RTM.Īs a part of giving you a preview of the dark theme I want to call your attention to several important characteristics of the Visual Studio 11 iconography.
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Many of you will see significant improvements to the dark theme in the RC release, but several of the key changes I’m sharing with you now didn’t make the timeline for RC. Once that was complete, we turned our attention to the dark theme, focusing on the top dark theme feedback we heard from Visual Studio 11 beta. Leading up to our being engineering complete for RC we focused most of our design attention on optimizing the light theme experience, because that’s what our telemetry indicates the majority of you are currently using. The request was for more information on the Visual Studio 11 dark theme. The purpose of this post is to follow up on a common request relating to the earlier RC preview post. I want to pass along that we are still internalizing your feedback and actively working on the next Visual Studio 11 milestones. As we’re closing in on the final designs for Visual Studio 11 I want to thank you again for your feedback.
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