Colours!

jack_lavender

Are your computers only greyscale? In the UK we have largely moved on to colour computers now...

I think it would be great to have colours in: sketches to distinguish dimensions from lines. Maybe dimensions could be navy blue? In the toolbar you could, for example distinguish the equal from parallel constraint, the line from dimension. Of course you get used to it but I do think the appearance could more intuitive and require less squinting at the screen. 

john_mcclary

Greyscale was a design choice, at first I thought the same thing. Everything looks so plain.

but once I get used to it, then go into another app which is 'colorful' it just looks cheap and 1995 looking.
I really like the clean crisp look of Onshape now.

example: sketchup 2022

alnis

I definitely agree that the clean UI of Onshape looks great. However, I can also definitely see that some tasteful color coding could help make it easier to differentiate and select tools.

I'm not sure what the best way to do this within Onshape would be, but I do think it is possible to use color-coding to make Onshape easier to navigate. Particularly the wall-of-text menus...


For example, here are Blender's sculpting tools:

• Blue -> adding or removing a chunk of material
• Red -> smoothing
• Yellow -> deforming
• Green/yellow/red combo -> face sets
• Purple -> cloth simulation
• No color -> rudimentary/basic operations

The properties panel uses color coding for categories which makes it easier to quickly find the option you're looking for (albeit different color coding than the sculpting tools):

• Gray -> global
• Red -> visual
• Orange -> object
• Blue -> behavior
• Green -> data

These conventions generally carry over to the scene explorer:

---

Here are Godot's available top-level nodes:

• Red -> 3D
• Green -> UI
• Blue -> 2D
• Purple -> animation
• Gray -> not visually present
• Combination -> affects multiple environments

Which makes reading a scene easier:

S1mon

Overall, I like the minimal use of color in Onshape, but there are a few places where it could use some refinements:

1. Syntax highlighting in Featurescript editing is subtle, perhaps too subtle. The highlight for the parenthesis matching is almost impossible to see. I know that Ace has all kinds of ways to color in the syntax, and it might be nice to allow more customization there.
2. Debug colors (other than just red) are an improvement, but it might be nice to have some more options.
3. Color coding for draft and curvature analysis is a bit odd coming from other CAD packages. It would be nice to have good gradients. I would HIGHLY recommend that Onshape looks at the work on perceptually even color tables that was done here: https://bids.github.io/colormap/
4. There are other improvement tickets around color coding sketches which I would agree with. I didn't use this much in other CAD tools, but it can be very useful.
5. This is not exactly related, but constraint icons in sketches are blurry images, but in the menu, they are crisp vectors. The coloring of the constraints could also be dialed in to make them more distinct from the sketches. 

andrew_kleinert

My 2 cents ...

... If the functionality / ergonomics of Onshape would be improved by updating the colour palette, then I think it'd be a good idea. 

I'm not so attached to the current style: changing style will always upset people, but the philosophy of  'form follows function' is a timeless one.  People will get used to a change as long as it genuinely adds value, and that's properly implemented (use properly set up colour-themes, account for colour-blindness, ensure it's consistent with corporate branding, etc, etc)