LabVIEW
What is the best Icon Style? Any standards?
Hi guys!
As a follow up from this thread and a tip from Jeff, I created this thread.
-Are there any standards for icon style, that LV programmers usually use?
-What is, in your opinion, the best choice of colors, text etc?
-Is/should there (be) a standard for icon style? Like red for error handling, blue for signal handling, orange for mathematic handeling etc?
Great Question! and an often overlooked feature of LabVIEW. The Icons we create aid us in visualizing relationships between sub-vi.s The Style guide mentions creating a "Meaningful" icon without defining the term meaningful.
to quote myself " LabVIEW lets me program the way I think..." so what is "meaningful" to me may not convey as much information to you. I find that for me a standard Icon contains a mix of text and glyphs and usually a banner at the top with a mnemonic indicating scope of the vi. It works for me because it was formed from the way I interperate information presented visually.
Co-incidentally, Yesterday I was "strapping on" for a new project. You know stuff like tweaking the LabVIEW.ini, Setting up TestStand model options, Creating a code repository, upgrading the "New... vi from template" Template.vits to "Silver" and creating icon templates. The basics that let me code faster. (I'll set up Quick Drops on the fly)
Here is a peek at my Icon Template folder- and a as used example. I've seen much more extensive libraries but this is a reasonably simple project and this should get me started.
That's a nice set of templates, Jeff! I think I'll create one of my own for further programming. Your template set has nice toned colors which I believe will look good on the block diagram. I see now that my all-red-icons are not so describing as the should be. A color in the header and white body with a glyph and maybe text will look better.
Thank your for the tip!
My icons are all fairly consistent, and I try to display a VI's heirarchy within their icons. - For example if a class is part of a library
The top part of the icon is used for showing the name of the library or collection.
By and large, a sub VI is an action upon data. I therefore try to indicate the meaning or description of that data and drop it in the bottom right.
If I am altering a specific part of the data, I try to show that in the bottom left
The action that is being performed goes in the top left.
The top right allows the action to be extended right, or the item to be extended up, if more space is needed.
@Even Deejay wrote:
That's a nice set of templates, Jeff! I think I'll create one of my own for further programming. Your template set has nice toned colors which I believe will look good on the block diagram. I see now that my all-red-icons are not so describing as the should be. A color in the header and white body with a glyph and maybe text will look better.
Thank your for the tip!
I'll hand out a couple more tips.
- The banner text and colors. In practice plain black text isn't always a good choice - of you observe closely, and have a good eye type the text TWICE once in black set against he lower border and again in white centered ( a pixel up and left of the black text and on top off the black. Then set the transparency of the text to 80%. Readable anywhere without over-popping. (That took years to figure out
) play with transparency of glyphs too! - Background color of the lower area- use it to set off sub-groups. The Widget driver example sub-vi can be easily distinguished from the Gizmos drivers that have a different low BG color but the green banner tells me they are both drivers.
