Identifying which style colors a shape

[Hoptoad]

I often give my color styles generic names, like 'hair' and 'shirt.' Unfortunately, this becomes problematic whenever I have several characters in a scene and I want to change somebody's shirt color, for example, and I don't know which "shirt" style within the list of styles is the one I want to change.

This could be solved with a checkmark.

Lost Marble, would you make it so that when you select a shape and then look at the menu of styles, the style applied to the selected shape would be identified by a checkmark?

Thanks.

[synthsin75]

If you select the shape and open the applied style dropdown, there is a checkmark on the one that's applied.

At least on Windows.

[Hoptoad]

I'm on a Mac.

I am happy to know Windows has the checkmark. It must be an oversight, not having the feature on the Mac version.

I'll fill-out a ticket, to make sure Lost Marble knows about it.

Thanks for the comment.

[synthsin75]

Here's what it looks like on Windows:

[Hoptoad]

Oh my, what a lovely checkmark. That's exactly what I want.

I filled-out the feature-request ticket, so hopefully it'll be in the next update.

I once saw a checkmark, but. . .but I never saw it again. Perhaps it only appears under strange circumstances? So maybe the code is there, but not working properly? I don't know.

Could I have imagined the checkmark? you ask.

No. And how dare you ask me that.

I distinctly remember seeing it and thinking,"Hey, a checkmark! I never noticed that before," and continued making my vector art and I never saw the checkmark again. It was gone forever. Like when you are six years old, alone in the woods, and you see a unicorn in a clearing, and the unicorn slowly approaches you, so you throw a rock at it and it runs away and you never see it again.

[SimplSam]

Checkmark is also there on macOS version (just checked).

[Hoptoad]

I have around 30 styles right now in the project I'm working on.

I click the shape on the face, selecting the shape. The style is called "skin." It says so right there, in the style window.

I activate the menu listing all the styles. I see the name "skin."

No checkmark.

What's going on?

[synthsin75]

Are you looking at the top style dropdown or the Style 1 & Style 2 dropdowns?

[Hoptoad]

GASP!

I had been looking at the top style dropdown - the one by the tab.

Because of your question, I clicked the Style 1 dropdown and found the missing checkmark.

I'm unaware of the logic in omitting the checkmark from the top style dropdown, but I'm happy to have found it. Thanks.

EDIT:
I just discovered that clicking on the checkmarked style does nothing; I still have to go to the top style dropdown to alter the style's color. The whole checkmark thing seems like a misplaced tool. It's like: look in this location to gather information, then go to another location to use it.

IMO, the checkmark should be where I was expecting it to be.

[synthsin75]

When you select a style from the top dropdown, the style name is shown, so there's generally no need to indicate the selected style another way.

For your case, of having many same-named styles, you just need to check which it is from the Style 1/2 dropdowns.

Sounds like more of a problem with workflow. Luckily, you can fix this after the fact. Once you find which style is for which character, etc., you can rename it, so you don't continue to have that problem.

[Hoptoad]

Yeh, I have been slowly improving my style-naming conventions. But I don't like it. I like short names like "hair," not descriptive names like "Stewart's hair" and "Stewart's belt buckle."

Hmm. I have an idea for a brand new feature. . .

Brand New Style Feature: Activating it will display the styles for 1 character only, the character being worked on at the moment, while hiding the styles of the other characters in the scene.

Man, that would be nice.

Yo, Lost Marble. Can you do that for next update? Thanks.

[Daxel]

I'm unaware of the logic in omitting the checkmark from the top style dropdown, but I'm happy to have found it. Thanks.

EDIT:
I just discovered that clicking on the checkmarked style does nothing; I still have to go to the top style dropdown to alter the style's color. The whole checkmark thing seems like a misplaced tool. It's like: look in this location to gather information, then go to another location to use it.

IMO, the checkmark should be where I was expecting it to be.

The style panel atacks again haha.

The UX is confusing but this is the logic:

You select a shape, and now the style panel changes from DEFAULT mode to SHAPE mode to show all the information about the selected shape under the SHAPE letters. The "Styles" drop down menu, as the "Shapes" drop down menu are not displaying information about the selected shape, that's why they are not under the SHAPE letters but abobe, and that's why there is no checkmark there.Because all it does is to change the focus of the style panel to the selected saved style, which changes the style panel to STYLE mode (displaying the information about the selected saved style).

But the Style 1 and Style 2, as the rest of the information, are under the SHAPE letters because they are properties of the selected shape, so clicking on a style there means to modify the style 1 property of the selected shape and that's why there you can see the checkmark and that's why clicking on the checkmarked style does nothing, because it's already set as the style 1 of that shape. To edit the appearance of a shape that is using a saved style like "shirt", you don't have to edit the shape's style but the saved "shirt" style, and that's when you use the upper Style dropdown menu to select the saved style making the Style panel switch to STYLE mode.

[Hoptoad]

STYLE INFO

Thanks for writing that. You answered my nebulous question in a way that answered my question and my follow-up questions. I feel like a video game character that just added another skill point in Moho.

Your post made me search "UX." That's a nifty term. ("User Experience," for those who don't know.)

I feel like the UX of the style window could be improved a little bit. Perhaps it would be helpful to the user if there was a strong visual cue in the Style window that a shape had been selected. . .

Perhaps an ENTIRE NEW TAB (!) dedicated to manipulating the qualities of a selected shape could be added. As it now stands, the Style window does like 1,000 things, which is a lot of information to grasp and keep straight. It might be helpful to users if some of those tasks were collected into a separate window-tab.

Perhaps call the tab something like "Modify."

[Daxel]

I'm glad that helped!

Yeah the panel confuses a lot of people and could be improved, but it's not an easy task. It's easy to make everything super clear while sacrificing screen space, efficiency (number of actions required to perform a task) or both. Like, for example, having three panels instead of one.

The panel having three modes is a smart idea, it reduces the screen space and improves the efficiency but it's confusing because it changes automatically, which is nice but you don't have any visual hint that the panel is a three modes panel at a glance so it's hard to understand what is happening.

The visual interface doesn't help to convey a clear sense of hierarchy. We have the panel's mode in capital letters but that's not enough. The panel is splited by 3 lines that are equal to each other so it looks like they separate 4 groups of properties as equals, like the upper part of the panel is just the first group of properties while it should be clear that it is at a higher level as it shows/changes the object that the entire panel is about.

The naming is another source of confusion: style is used for the visual properties of a shape but also for a saved combination of properties that can be asigned to different shapes. That's why I use my own terms like "saved style" any time I want to be clear writing about this. Even if they are very similar in nature, when the concepts interact so much, having the same name adds a lot of ambiguity.

The same happens with moho's shape concept. It could be called skin, or any other way and we wouldn't have so many people confusing the points with the shapes. The name of the "Draw Shapes" tool promotes this ambiguity.