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Why does Inkscape's UI feel so... sloppy? I mean, Blender is a cross-platform, open-source design tool, and it manages to have a tight, professional looking UI.

Why does Inkscape's UI feel so... sloppy? I mean, Blender is a cross-platform, open-source design tool, and it manages to have a tight, professional looking UI. So how does Inkscape's UI still contrive to look like the first Java AWT application I wrote in the 90s? I know it's just a surface thing, and there's a lot of great functionality there. But it's still not exactly a sight that helps inspire you to create beautiful content using it.

nineteen999 7y ago
> Blender is a cross-platform, open-source design tool, and it manages to have a tight, professional looking UI Well let's remember that there was HEAVY criticism of Blender's UI up until the 2.5/2.6 releases, with some people even criticizing it now that 2.8 is released. There was an extreme amount of work done since 2.5 to clean up the UI. It also has a lot more functionality than Inkscape, and so I think there is incentive as more people start using it to make sure that all those functions are filed away neatly and accessible without cluttering the interface too much. Also, just going on users subscribed to their respective subreddits, Inkscape has around 6000 and Blender 151,000. So the size of the user base might have a direct impact. Personally I don't find the Inkscape UI to be all that bad, although I agree it could do with some tightening up. I still prefer to use Adobe Illustrator if I have it to hand, but Inkscape will always work in a pinch. Being able to use it to create SVG that can be directly imported into Blender as curves is something I've used it a lot for, for that kind of task they complement each other very well.
abcpassword 7y ago
Like most open source end user software, the open source contributions are strictly in development. Good software needs a consistent design vision, for which I’ve found exactly 0 open source examples. This is exactly the opposite of “a good FLOSS project.” It’s comically bad compared to even the discount competitors (sketch, affinity)
mjfisher 7y ago
If you're just looking at the surface of the UI, the v1 release appears to include theming. There's a lot more to UI than that, but it might help it feel a bit fresher
mkl 7y ago
Maybe it's your GTK theme? I would certainly call its UI tight and professional-looking in Kubuntu (even a bit too "nice-looking", as there's not much colour with which to identify icons at a glance; Blender looks like it has the same problem). The default theme on Windows does look kind of clunky, but it's never bothered me.
gnud 7y ago
I think this in general looks fine: https://inkscape.org/~doctormo/%E2%98%85ferrari https://inkscape.org/~doctormo/%E2%98%85ferrari I hate programs that re-invent toolbars and menus just to look "good" on the surface. My main problem, as a non-expert user, is that the different "groups" on the toolbars are not obvious to me, and so I don't understand all of the icons. They should have had a couple of more labels in there, or somethime.
ris 7y ago
It's fun how fashions change - for over a decade I listened to people decry how "unintuitive" and "cryptic" blender's interface and approach was (and I do realize that blender's interface has changed over the years, but not that much) and praised tools like Inkscape for following the "user friendly" approach and straightforward paradigms. (I have spent quite a long time using both and appreciate each's merits)

nineteen999 7y ago

> Blender is a cross-platform, open-source design tool, and it manages to have a tight, professional looking UI Well let's remember that there was HEAVY criticism of Blender's UI up until the 2.5/2.6 releases, with some people even criticizing it now that 2.8 is released. There was an extreme amount of work done since 2.5 to clean up the UI. It also has a lot more functionality than Inkscape, and so I think there is incentive as more people start using it to make sure that all those functions are filed away neatly and accessible without cluttering the interface too much. Also, just going on users subscribed to their respective subreddits, Inkscape has around 6000 and Blender 151,000. So the size of the user base might have a direct impact. Personally I don't find the Inkscape UI to be all that bad, although I agree it could do with some tightening up. I still prefer to use Adobe Illustrator if I have it to hand, but Inkscape will always work in a pinch. Being able to use it to create SVG that can be directly imported into Blender as curves is something I've used it a lot for, for that kind of task they complement each other very well.

abcpassword 7y ago

Like most open source end user software, the open source contributions are strictly in development. Good software needs a consistent design vision, for which I’ve found exactly 0 open source examples. This is exactly the opposite of “a good FLOSS project.” It’s comically bad compared to even the discount competitors (sketch, affinity)

mjfisher 7y ago

If you're just looking at the surface of the UI, the v1 release appears to include theming. There's a lot more to UI than that, but it might help it feel a bit fresher

mkl 7y ago

Maybe it's your GTK theme? I would certainly call its UI tight and professional-looking in Kubuntu (even a bit too "nice-looking", as there's not much colour with which to identify icons at a glance; Blender looks like it has the same problem). The default theme on Windows does look kind of clunky, but it's never bothered me.

gnud 7y ago

I think this in general looks fine: https://inkscape.org/~doctormo/%E2%98%85ferrari https://inkscape.org/~doctormo/%E2%98%85ferrari I hate programs that re-invent toolbars and menus just to look "good" on the surface. My main problem, as a non-expert user, is that the different "groups" on the toolbars are not obvious to me, and so I don't understand all of the icons. They should have had a couple of more labels in there, or somethime.

ris 7y ago

It's fun how fashions change - for over a decade I listened to people decry how "unintuitive" and "cryptic" blender's interface and approach was (and I do realize that blender's interface has changed over the years, but not that much) and praised tools like Inkscape for following the "user friendly" approach and straightforward paradigms. (I have spent quite a long time using both and appreciate each's merits)