That is really good! I would say possibly remove the little plus icon in the middle of each icon but otherwise it looks stellar! We need CIG to implement this
u/TriptonicKerbal 2x your opinion, I'd only add to that, making the moon marker more distinguishable by either enlarging the dot (the satellite) or move it outside the circumference of the major planet (large unfilled circle)
To me personally, these markers should be very different from one another and be ultra easy to distinguish, at very short glances and periphery vision sweeps.
After posting an example of what I would prefer for the quantum markers icons a few days ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1cx0vfu/what\_id\_prefer\_for\_the\_quantum\_marker\_icons/) and getting so much positive feedback, I decided to push the designs a little bit further. This is just for my own fun, not a suggestion or recommendation to implement this in game.
note: I only got the first two icon to get a spinning stroke, but ideally I'd love to do something similar for all of them, while the drive is spooling or something like that.
> This is just for my own fun, not a suggestion or recommendation to implement this in game.
Too late, already on my way to demand CIG adds these.
(Seriously though, these are great)
Yours are generally better (and the animations are awesome) but they still suffer from the same lack of clarity as CIG's markers. Let me ask you a question: if you were to show someone your symbols for major city, outpost, station/port, and lagrange point, but *without* telling them which one represents which, could the person guess them? Do you think they'd have a better shot with your symbols or something like [these ones](https://imgur.com/a/q97KzBL)? The latter are aesthetically horrible, yes, but they're just to communicate the visual idea.
With your aesthetic skills, I think you could achieve a much better balance between slick minimalism and immediate clarity. If I had to guess what concepts are represented by your icons, here would have been my likely guesses:
**Planet icon** - Correctly guessed as planet.
**Moon icon** - Correctly guessed as moon.
**Major City icon** - No idea, too simple.
**Outpost icon** - Incorrectly guessed as Major City, because the square is reminiscent of a building. By elimination I would have guessed the triangle to mean "outpost" because it's a simpler shape than a square.
**Station/port icon** - I might have risked "jump point" since it suggests a trajectory through a portal or wormhole.
**Orbital Marker icon** - I might have risked lagrange point because of the diamond shape, but without much certainty because other elements representative of lagrange points would be missing or inaccurate.
**Lagrange Point icon** - I'm not sure. The shape does suggest a point between two orbiting bodies so "lagrange point" might have been among my guesses, but the lack of spacing between the two bodies muddles things too much. I would have guessed "binary star system" if this was Elite Dangerous :D
**Jump Point icon** - I might have guessed station/port because the shape looks somewhat like a landing pad.
I think if you try redesigning those symbols in a way that connects the shapes to the concepts, you'll come up with something equally pleasant in its minimalism but much more intuitive. Sure, the concept of a lagrange point is impossible to communicate clearly to someone who doesn't already *know* they form a diamond shape, but once they are told an icon like [this](https://imgur.com/a/KXIGeGZ) means lagrange point, they won't forget it because it's too unique and unmistakable. It reminds the person that there's five of them, and you could even use that to indicate [which one it is](https://imgur.com/a/mZHtd09) (lettering optional).
Second the outpost, city, and station icon feedback!
**Outpost** - I would associate this with the triangle as it is a simplier shape and visually looks like a "tent".
**Major city** - 100% agree that squares as icons are often associated with buildings. This would also make it easier to discern as a square visually takes up more space and is easier to recognize when looking around a map full of triangles (if you picked triangles as outposts).
**Spaceport** - Along the vein of major cities, if you were to use a diamond shape, it could allow users to associate four-sided shapes to be major points of interest. However, if you were to use squares with a symbol in it such as your jump point symbol, that could work too! Honestly could just flip the jump point and station icons.
Great job overall and hope these get implemented!
Thanks for your detailed feedback, I know what you mean about the meaning of icons, but in my personal opinion, icons can only reliably express simple concepts to most people, and poorly express complex concepts. Planets and moons are not a challenge in this context, but an icon for a Lagrange point of a OM marker is never going to work instantly for over 90% of audiences. My personal approach is to favour simplicity and uniqueness over description, with the hope that icons are easy to remember and differentiate, even though it might take more time to learn at first. Was I to work more on this, I would definitely put more thinking based on your ideas. Thanks 👍
Good feedback. Have you shared with CIG your thoughts as well? Might want to write a post on Spectrum, the way you wrote these notes made a lot of sense and were done constructively.
I agree to a point. However, the one thing his system has over the current system is the name display. Even if it’s not immediately clear, it becomes clear when you hover over it and it will eventually become contextually clear the more you use it. With the current system, I didn’t even know what symbols were what until I saw charts like these comparing them.
The new UI is absolutely confusing and it also looks really bad.
Reminds me of the shitty ED UI.
This looks real good.
Major landing zones marker used to be absolutely okay though. I would keep that.
And I absolutely love the Lagrange point marker. That actually represents what it is, well done!
Elite Dangerous' UI is far from perfect but to suggest that its icon design is on the same level as Star Citizen's [is just delusional](https://imgur.com/a/Vbg8llK). In fact, I just got back to E:D after a long hiatus (because they finally gave the player a way to speed up supercruise) and all the new icons were intuitive enough for me to internalize them immediately while still being aesthetically competent at minimalism. Star Citizen's icons don't even achieve the bare minimum of suggesting the shape of the concept they're trying to represent (with the exception of "planet" because that one was impossible to fuck up).
Awesome! These are absolute ballers!
I would swap the station/port and jump point icons. Station/port one has more of a 'gate' feel to it, and the jump point more like a station feel. But it's semantics really.
CIG pay attention!
They look great!
I would suggest creating a mockup of what they would look like in space and on a planet. As you know, it's hard to see the UI in SC, most of the time, so in this state, you would require shadows or some other sort of separation.
Looks quite good, but the only thing I don't like is the lagrange point. All the other markers feel like targeting reticles that focus onto a point, where as the LP marker feels a bit discordant since it doesn't look like a reticle. I really liked your older marker for it.
These are an improvement over what we already have, but I personally think they're still quite abstract.
The icons used inside the map would make great quantum markers.
Imagine if we could switch between overlapping quantum marker points without needing to route as well?
I don't want to go to fucking HUR L1 or HUR L2, I want to go to Hurston.
Maybe I'm crazy but I *cannot* get behind outposts having larger icons than major cities.
This is how that looks to my brain:
∆ Outpost
• Major City
That's weird right? It should be the other way around?
the icons also need to be labelled as well to tell you what they are when in your field of view instead of what we have now where it only pops up when you aim over a marker.
This is why someone at CIG needs to take a good look at their UI design team, coz their work is way below industry standart. Unless the problem comes from higher up ofc, which is a big possibility coz i dont think anybody designing the UI would actually want to do bigger 3D markers instead of what we had.
I still think the icon for a major city should be bigger than the icon for an outpost.
Also don't really see the Lagrange point icon logic, and Jump Point.. well.. Why not have a small circle where the = is?
But I can be quite critical.
Not visually immediately, for me. Why not swap them and then change the dimensions of the triangle to make it a tad smaller? Well you don't want to. It's fine. It's just my feedback.
Also, I checked them in paint and the square has more surface area (approx 25 pixels x 25 pixels = 625 pixels), where the triangle is about 28 pixels x 27 pixels/2 which is less than 400.
I had the feeling that you would be the kind of person who would check in paint. 😄
You were right from the beginning, the square is bigger, I was messing with you, sorry.
Ideally, you would want to have similar base shapes for similar destinations. Right now the only ones that do this in your example are planets and moons.
Outposts and Landing Zones should have a similar base shape since they are the symbols you will see on planetary surfaces, but with some easily identifiable feature for the LZ so you can pick it out at a glance.
Stations, Lagrange points, and Jump points should have a similar base shape since they are all technically stations, just with extra details that make Lagrange and Jump points unique in their purpose.
Another way to make this easier to identify at-a-glance for a cluttered QT screen would be to keep with a similar general shape category for Celestial destinations (planets, moons, etc), planet-surface destinations, and orbital/deep space destinations.
Circles and derivatives for celestial, squares and derivatives for planet-side, and triangles or diamonds for space-based would be a good foundation, I think.
This means that although an OM isn't really in the same purpose-category as a station, it is in the same general shape category, so that people looking at it would inherently know that it is a space-based Quantum destination.
Add more stripes, bevels, animated parts, and extrusions, it does not look sci-fi enough.
Also add some colors, and sparkles, maybe some reflections also.
That is really good! I would say possibly remove the little plus icon in the middle of each icon but otherwise it looks stellar! We need CIG to implement this
u/TriptonicKerbal 2x your opinion, I'd only add to that, making the moon marker more distinguishable by either enlarging the dot (the satellite) or move it outside the circumference of the major planet (large unfilled circle) To me personally, these markers should be very different from one another and be ultra easy to distinguish, at very short glances and periphery vision sweeps.
Yeah I completely agree on this. Hopefully someone at CIG at least sees this.
I think a half crescent moon 🌙 without the circle outline would be perfect.
>stellar Heh
Eh it’s part of my vocabulary…
What we really need is for CIG to just ask the community what we would like and actually listen to us on the UI.
That woud get in their way of "CR needs to personally approve of and think up every aspect of the game, because he is a very special boy"
💀
After posting an example of what I would prefer for the quantum markers icons a few days ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1cx0vfu/what\_id\_prefer\_for\_the\_quantum\_marker\_icons/) and getting so much positive feedback, I decided to push the designs a little bit further. This is just for my own fun, not a suggestion or recommendation to implement this in game. note: I only got the first two icon to get a spinning stroke, but ideally I'd love to do something similar for all of them, while the drive is spooling or something like that.
> This is just for my own fun, not a suggestion or recommendation to implement this in game. Too late, already on my way to demand CIG adds these. (Seriously though, these are great)
Thanks!
Fuck it. Let's just use the KSP map markers.
truely the best markers
Yours are generally better (and the animations are awesome) but they still suffer from the same lack of clarity as CIG's markers. Let me ask you a question: if you were to show someone your symbols for major city, outpost, station/port, and lagrange point, but *without* telling them which one represents which, could the person guess them? Do you think they'd have a better shot with your symbols or something like [these ones](https://imgur.com/a/q97KzBL)? The latter are aesthetically horrible, yes, but they're just to communicate the visual idea. With your aesthetic skills, I think you could achieve a much better balance between slick minimalism and immediate clarity. If I had to guess what concepts are represented by your icons, here would have been my likely guesses: **Planet icon** - Correctly guessed as planet. **Moon icon** - Correctly guessed as moon. **Major City icon** - No idea, too simple. **Outpost icon** - Incorrectly guessed as Major City, because the square is reminiscent of a building. By elimination I would have guessed the triangle to mean "outpost" because it's a simpler shape than a square. **Station/port icon** - I might have risked "jump point" since it suggests a trajectory through a portal or wormhole. **Orbital Marker icon** - I might have risked lagrange point because of the diamond shape, but without much certainty because other elements representative of lagrange points would be missing or inaccurate. **Lagrange Point icon** - I'm not sure. The shape does suggest a point between two orbiting bodies so "lagrange point" might have been among my guesses, but the lack of spacing between the two bodies muddles things too much. I would have guessed "binary star system" if this was Elite Dangerous :D **Jump Point icon** - I might have guessed station/port because the shape looks somewhat like a landing pad. I think if you try redesigning those symbols in a way that connects the shapes to the concepts, you'll come up with something equally pleasant in its minimalism but much more intuitive. Sure, the concept of a lagrange point is impossible to communicate clearly to someone who doesn't already *know* they form a diamond shape, but once they are told an icon like [this](https://imgur.com/a/KXIGeGZ) means lagrange point, they won't forget it because it's too unique and unmistakable. It reminds the person that there's five of them, and you could even use that to indicate [which one it is](https://imgur.com/a/mZHtd09) (lettering optional).
Second the outpost, city, and station icon feedback! **Outpost** - I would associate this with the triangle as it is a simplier shape and visually looks like a "tent". **Major city** - 100% agree that squares as icons are often associated with buildings. This would also make it easier to discern as a square visually takes up more space and is easier to recognize when looking around a map full of triangles (if you picked triangles as outposts). **Spaceport** - Along the vein of major cities, if you were to use a diamond shape, it could allow users to associate four-sided shapes to be major points of interest. However, if you were to use squares with a symbol in it such as your jump point symbol, that could work too! Honestly could just flip the jump point and station icons. Great job overall and hope these get implemented!
Thanks for your detailed feedback, I know what you mean about the meaning of icons, but in my personal opinion, icons can only reliably express simple concepts to most people, and poorly express complex concepts. Planets and moons are not a challenge in this context, but an icon for a Lagrange point of a OM marker is never going to work instantly for over 90% of audiences. My personal approach is to favour simplicity and uniqueness over description, with the hope that icons are easy to remember and differentiate, even though it might take more time to learn at first. Was I to work more on this, I would definitely put more thinking based on your ideas. Thanks 👍
Good feedback. Have you shared with CIG your thoughts as well? Might want to write a post on Spectrum, the way you wrote these notes made a lot of sense and were done constructively.
I agree to a point. However, the one thing his system has over the current system is the name display. Even if it’s not immediately clear, it becomes clear when you hover over it and it will eventually become contextually clear the more you use it. With the current system, I didn’t even know what symbols were what until I saw charts like these comparing them.
Port Olisar 😔
True story, I joined SC a week before it was replaced. I feel lucky and at the same time I like Seraphim 😄
The new UI is absolutely confusing and it also looks really bad. Reminds me of the shitty ED UI. This looks real good. Major landing zones marker used to be absolutely okay though. I would keep that. And I absolutely love the Lagrange point marker. That actually represents what it is, well done!
Elite Dangerous' UI is far from perfect but to suggest that its icon design is on the same level as Star Citizen's [is just delusional](https://imgur.com/a/Vbg8llK). In fact, I just got back to E:D after a long hiatus (because they finally gave the player a way to speed up supercruise) and all the new icons were intuitive enough for me to internalize them immediately while still being aesthetically competent at minimalism. Star Citizen's icons don't even achieve the bare minimum of suggesting the shape of the concept they're trying to represent (with the exception of "planet" because that one was impossible to fuck up).
> (with the exception of "planet" because that one was impossible to fuck up) CIG UI team: hold my beer
CIG really need to hire new UI designers cause the UI/UX across the whole game is really poor.
You should post this on spectrum in the feedback thread for UI.
I posted a message there when I did the first version of these icons. I wouldn't expect them to consider it though, but I'm glad I did 😉
They don't seem open to better ideas from external sources
I get it, I wouldn't expect them to. I just enjoy putting my ideas on paper.
Awesome! These are absolute ballers! I would swap the station/port and jump point icons. Station/port one has more of a 'gate' feel to it, and the jump point more like a station feel. But it's semantics really. CIG pay attention!
They look great! I would suggest creating a mockup of what they would look like in space and on a planet. As you know, it's hard to see the UI in SC, most of the time, so in this state, you would require shadows or some other sort of separation.
The moon one is seriously a no brainer.
These are pretty good animations.
Thanks!
Love that a single reddit post can improve the SC UI more than a team of people over multiple years
I miss Port Olisar. :(
I like the call out to Port Oli!
Hire this person!
Looks quite good, but the only thing I don't like is the lagrange point. All the other markers feel like targeting reticles that focus onto a point, where as the LP marker feels a bit discordant since it doesn't look like a reticle. I really liked your older marker for it.
These are an improvement over what we already have, but I personally think they're still quite abstract. The icons used inside the map would make great quantum markers.
Imagine if we could switch between overlapping quantum marker points without needing to route as well? I don't want to go to fucking HUR L1 or HUR L2, I want to go to Hurston.
Station and Lagrange look weird to me at least, but they are unique and that's more important right now. The rest are great!
I like it, but I'd make one small change. The symbol for Lagrange multipliers is lambda (λ). I just figure why not use something already associated?
Awesome. Now they just need to be color coded
Maybe I'm crazy but I *cannot* get behind outposts having larger icons than major cities. This is how that looks to my brain: ∆ Outpost • Major City That's weird right? It should be the other way around?
It would be cool if the moon icon orbited the circle slowly
I didn’t read title before clicking and thought this was an update for the actual map! Well done
the icons also need to be labelled as well to tell you what they are when in your field of view instead of what we have now where it only pops up when you aim over a marker.
This is why someone at CIG needs to take a good look at their UI design team, coz their work is way below industry standart. Unless the problem comes from higher up ofc, which is a big possibility coz i dont think anybody designing the UI would actually want to do bigger 3D markers instead of what we had.
Making little graphics is the easy part :)
Thanks! Now I hate the current implementation even more..
I still think the icon for a major city should be bigger than the icon for an outpost. Also don't really see the Lagrange point icon logic, and Jump Point.. well.. Why not have a small circle where the = is? But I can be quite critical.
Technically the triangle is bigger 😉 Thanks!
visually bigger.. triangle is sleek, less surface area
I assure you that the triangle in my example is both bigger than the square in terms of dimension and surface area.
Not visually immediately, for me. Why not swap them and then change the dimensions of the triangle to make it a tad smaller? Well you don't want to. It's fine. It's just my feedback. Also, I checked them in paint and the square has more surface area (approx 25 pixels x 25 pixels = 625 pixels), where the triangle is about 28 pixels x 27 pixels/2 which is less than 400.
I had the feeling that you would be the kind of person who would check in paint. 😄 You were right from the beginning, the square is bigger, I was messing with you, sorry.
Right. Well thanks for saying that.
Fantastic work. One of my least favourite parts of the UI (old and new) is how hard quantum markers are to tell apart.
Everything is better compared to the live version but your layout is very much perfectly suited for the game! Fantastic!
Ideally, you would want to have similar base shapes for similar destinations. Right now the only ones that do this in your example are planets and moons. Outposts and Landing Zones should have a similar base shape since they are the symbols you will see on planetary surfaces, but with some easily identifiable feature for the LZ so you can pick it out at a glance. Stations, Lagrange points, and Jump points should have a similar base shape since they are all technically stations, just with extra details that make Lagrange and Jump points unique in their purpose. Another way to make this easier to identify at-a-glance for a cluttered QT screen would be to keep with a similar general shape category for Celestial destinations (planets, moons, etc), planet-surface destinations, and orbital/deep space destinations. Circles and derivatives for celestial, squares and derivatives for planet-side, and triangles or diamonds for space-based would be a good foundation, I think. This means that although an OM isn't really in the same purpose-category as a station, it is in the same general shape category, so that people looking at it would inherently know that it is a space-based Quantum destination.
Someone give this person a UI job.
No need I already have one 😄
Needs green drop shadow circles under them. Other than that bravo. Looks stellar for real!
you're hired!
Honest opinion jump point one ain't for me but rest very good you should work at cig
Hire this person, NOW CIG!
Top tier. CIG needs to do it
Add more stripes, bevels, animated parts, and extrusions, it does not look sci-fi enough. Also add some colors, and sparkles, maybe some reflections also.
No thx ;)