New Editor Theme

Thank you for providing an early build and giving us a chance to fix our extensions prior its release.

It would be even more useful during testing and fixing our tools, if you allow us to activate the Light and Dark theme in the provided editor build, regardless of the License.

EDIT: I mean for a given time frame only, until we tested and fixed our tools, not providing dark theme for free in general.

 

My feedback after using the Light theme for about 10 minutes only (Windows 10, 1920x1080 resolution).

The font seems to be smaller and blurrier than in previous Unity versions. I find this very exhausting to look at and have to take a break from Unity after those 10 minutes already. Other than that, I like the flat style. It looks fresh. Good work!

Spoiler: Screenshot

EDIT
It took me about an hour to fix my "Texture Overview" extension to work with Unity 2019's new editor UI, but the UI of this extension isn't very complex to be fair.

A few GUI controls now seem to have different sizes and I had to fix this by moving elements a few pixels to compensate.

I used EditorStyles.toolbar.normal.background in a few places, which now seems to be null.

I noticed the editor files are not in an "Editor" directory in the provided zip archive. Is this going to be like this in the installer as well? Because it broke some of my build scripts.

 

When are they just gonna get rid of the light theme already?
Unreal, Xenko, Godot [insert more here], you don't hear people complaining about how the editor hurts their eyes, do you? That is unique to Unity

Unfortunately this case has been pleaded to deaf ears many times before so I don't see them caring about your opinion that the skin that already causes eye strain is now causing eye strain faster...

They may even be doing this intentionally to force more subscriptions

 

on a quick peek, at least its not as bad as expected : ]

**please note the newer posts, its still going into worse direction..

some random comments:
- blurry text as mentioned earlier^
- light gray text on light gray background..bit hard to see
old: easy to see black text

new: has small lighter color text


- i don't think that small hat is better symbol for help or documentation (and since its so small, cannot clearly see its a hat either)
- dark text or icon on dark background


- vertical scrollbar is nearly invisible (same color as background, and scrollbar background completely same as background)


- clicking from one dropdown to another, requires now 1 extra click to open it (try clicking gameobject Tag dropdown, then Layer dropdown, in old version the dropdown works on first click)
- felt like maximizing/opening material was slower than in old version.. (click that small > to minimize/maximize)
- old stats window was better for readability (and size, new one takes much more screenspace just for padding..)
- tab titles still have that extra width (after close button was removed)

*added
- particle system module has super micro font!
- new asset store still pretty much un-usable in asset store window

 

The new theme has the same problems that every single other flat design has: removing visual information makes it harder to use. Please ask yourself, with brutal honesty, if the changes are actually an improvement, or just making stuff flat for the sake of it. For example, it's very hard to see the difference between a text field and a drop-down. They're all just flat rectangles with zero visual distinction, aside from the small icon on the right. Compared to the current theme, it's harder to see drop-downs and so on since they blend in with the background more. There's even less differentiation between components in the inspector compared to the current theme (there could stand to be more, not less). I don't think stuff should be spaced out vertically so much, except where it would improve differentiation between sections.

It is absolutely OK for buttons to look like buttons! Really! Remove the gradients if you want, that's immaterial, but interact-able items should be more obvious that they are interact-able items and not labels. It should be much more visually obvious which type of controls are which. (And please don't remove the light theme; the dark theme hurts my eyes more, and this one in particular makes the inherent problems with flat designs even worse.) I want to use the Unity editor, I don't want to admire how "fresh" it looks.

--Eric

 

Well it took me around 2 hours to fix my dictionary drawer and after working with it for that long I do have to agree with the previous messages. My eyes hurt because of the font blurriness, button colors and scrollbar colors. I had to force my eyes way to much to work with it.

At least I was able to find a solution that works on 5.6.5-2019

 

Bug with the new universal Settings window, it's too hard to close the window; for me it usually opens the context menu.
Also shouldn't that option be next to the close button?

 

I can't stress enough how much I support this. Enough that I'm quoting your post to make sure the Unity staff doesn't miss it.
Please, don't downgrade Unity's UI with flat design that removes information. I'd argue that Unity's current UI is actually pretty good, even better than Godot and Unreal's UI. If Unity wants to give a fresh look to the UI then it should not be any less clear and intuitive than the current UI. We don't want another bad UI Redesign like what we had with the lithium forum skin one year ago.

 

I would just like to say that I detest the new UI. Pure and simple. Nothing more to say. It feels like Unity these days is focused on changing UI/UX for their stuff for no good reason other than to find something to do. Did the same with As 2.0.

Please keep the current UI. If it's not broken don't fix it...

 

Should those icons be blue? It's impossible to see them when they are selected.

Also is it only me or does this look really bad? (Wasted space, some things are left/right sides and some are just centered - no consistency)

 

I like it apart from the dropdowns. I like they way the stand out in the current theme, very easy for your eyes to quickly locate them.

 

This feels like change for change's sake. The flat look is very much the fashion now, but it simply doesn't help much. It looks good (even better than the current one) at a glance, but I don't think it's helping usability in any way..

First impression with opening it is that I'm struggling to read all of the text. Your new font's kerning is just garbage. Here's a side-by-side from 2018.3 beta to the editor theme build:



See how tiny the text is? See how cramped all the letters are? I've got trouble reading that. Especially that "create" button. The new font kills readability.

People are also correct in that it's blurry. Here's a super-closeup of the favourites menu above:



See how much crisper the old (right-hand) text is? Take a look at those L's in "All". They're two solid pixels all the way from top to bottom in the old font, and in the new font they're a blurry mess.

Are your designers testing this on something that's not a retina display? I've got a couple of good, old samsung 1080p displays in front of me, and I'm getting more nearsighted just by looking at the new UI.

Okay, so enough fonts, other things:



You introduced this in 2018.3, and I'm sad to see it stick around to the new UI. I'm talking about that blue line! It's ugly, and drags my eyes away from what I'm looking at. There's never been a time where I've been confused about what window was active.



I don't like the new look of the drop-down button. You get what it is when it's close-up, but it's a button that's never close up. It's always tiny, and when it's tiny it just looks like a blob. The old design of the drop-down button isn't the greatest, but this is worse.

I also keep clicking it when I'm trying to click the X, which I never did in the old UI.

More to follow, hitting image limit

 

The dividing line between two components has gone almost entirely invisible, which makes it harder to quickly identify where a new component is. The white for that line was much better.

As a positive, you seem to have cranked up the spacing between elements. EditorGUIUtility.singleLineHeight is now 18 instead of 16. That helps the UI breathe more.



There used to be a little square to the next of the Shaded dropdown, as well as "Create" in the hierarchy and project windows. That's gone now, and it looks really bad - those buttons should not be flush with the side of the window.


The new icons are just ugly. Flat doesn't look good. It never did! The shading and color variance is much more comfortable to look at.
I also know that you don't need the "C#" there since there's only C# scripts now, but the lone hashtag is just nonsensical.

 

Does anybody know if we will still be able to switch to classic skin? So in the same way we can switch between Pro and personal, but instead have something like Classic and Modern( )

 

While it's lovely that the tool selection menu and the tool handle position menus now have the same height, the icons are pretty bad. First of all, like the font, some of the icons gets a bit blurry. Both the move tool and the multitool lost a bunch of crispness.

The scale tool is just utterly nonsensical - I don't understand how it's supposed to represent scaling? It also looks near identical with the pivot/center toggle in pivot mode, so that's confusing.

The Pivot/Center and Local/Global toggle icons got better. I'm still not quite reading the Pivot/Center icons very well, but the old ones are just blurs, so any improvement is a good one.



I really like that there's an outline for hovered input fields now. That's just a straight up improvement. I really don't like how all of the input fields has lost their one pixel drop shadow. This is back to the flat thing, they just looked more enjoyable before.

The buttons are worse, though:



That is not a button. It's a label with a strange background. Look at how much more comfortable this old UI is:



There's drop-shadows on the input fields, there's a better font for the letters, there's a drop-shadow and gradient for the button, all of that just makes it friendlier.


I'm not by definition against a redesign - there's even some good things here. But, man is the overall picture a downgrade. Please go back to the drawing board.

 

No no please don't do it. I've just tested the new UI and it's a huge step backwards. @benoitd_unity I can understand your point, as you're developing the new UI on Mac with a huge-res monitor. That's fine, and it looks truly awesome there. But on Windows with average resolutions (Full HD) it's barely usable.

• Font smoothing. I can't emphasize how bad this is. As happens to others, it hurts my eyes to the point that I have to take a rest after a few minutes. No matter what you decide to do, please include an option in preferences to use the current Editor font. I know it will look horrible in your Mac, but I assure you it will be a lifesaver for the rest of us.
• Spacing inconsistency: smaller text but more unused space between the UI elements in the Inspector. New version looks weird compared with the previous one. Just compare the Transform and Light components between both versions in the picture below.
• New icons look good to me. That's what I call a new fresh look. I love them!

If were to decide about the new UI:

• Adopt the new icons. They look great. I especially love the new GameObject icon in the Hierarchy window.
• Make the UI more flat by removing gradients, but keep the sizes and 3D effects so buttons look like buttons and control types can be easily differentiated.
• Keep the font sizes and spacing as they're now in Unity 2018. Please test the new UI on Windows in FullHD! If you make it look good there, it will look great on Mac.
• Include an option in Preferences to use the actual 2018 font without smoothing.

This is how it looks on Windows, before and after. I can't see the new UI as an improvement. Only icons are better.

 

The fonts are way too small and appear to be blurry. I have a perfectly normal vision and can barely read the text in and around the console area. I'm using Windows @ 1080p.

 

So I've just decided to take this for a small spin with a plugin I am working on right now.

So there are a few issues which I think should be regarded as bugs. BeginVertical does not seem to enclose all controls as it did before. Buttons need to enclose the text. Bold font looks terrible.

I also have some horizontal toolbars sitting below one another and there is a small horizontal desync happening between the buttons. New toolbar look is simply terrible. Flat so to speak.

I sincerely can not find anything wrong with the old UI or anything good or better about the new one. This change is not necessary. Please leave the UI alone...

 

Bold text also has severe readability problems:

 

From the Transition Guide:

Editor font was changed from Lucida Grande to Roboto on all operating systems. Roboto uses the same font size as before, but the font itself is slightly wider. ​

Evidently, the font itself is narrower on Windows. I'd check out if Roboto is suitable for the Editor given the severe discrepancies between Windows and Mac.

 

Wow! The small text of the Particle System is terrible!



Unity 2018:

 

Why does this seem to be a case of some middle manager somewhere saying "Hey, these guys don't have anything to do at the moment, why don't we get them to redesign the UI?"

or some higher manager going "I need to exert my authority otherwise I'll have to do some *actual* work. I know, I'll make them change the UI. I never liked it in the first place"

 

Trying out different things to make Unity better is a good idea in my opinion.

They have to fix various issues, such as the ones that came up in this thread already and then it's probably going to be of better usability and look than earlier versions.

It's the first public preview release, things will improve after a few iterations. I believe it's a great opportunity for the community to report UI/UX improvements now, which would otherwise probably not be heard.

Spoiler: Unity Editor 1

 

I like the new theme in general.
You got me 95% on board.

But the new font seems to be more narrow than the old one for some letters.
I really don't like how 'C', 'e' and many other letters seem to be squashed a bit, that does not look good and does not save any space.

It just looks bad.

For examples compare the tab header for "Console", the 'O' in "prefab: open" at the top right corner, the 'C' in "Cast shadows", ...

I hope that is not intentional.

 

I can see how it might seem that way. But from all the things I've seen in the past this change was *probably* (just a guess, I don't work at Unity or have any inside information) motivated by the fact that the IMGUI was a major pain in the ass.

The slow change towards retained mode UI stuff has been a work-in-progress for a long time already.

If you ever created an editor window or something for Unity you know what I mean.

The guys at unity were obviously aware of that for a long time...

Anyway, the part of visually updating some images is pretty much the easiest and quickest part in all of this. The infrastructure changes to how the UI works is a much bigger undertaking (and very much welcome! )

 

It felt like Xenko Editor which i don't mind though. But the readability issue mentioned above by everyone need to be taken care of, might want to check the latest CE Editor, they did a great job on the new editor.
also is it just me or the new light theme are using a very low contrast? for some reason the old light theme color are more balanced rather the new one, also it's too bright . The dark theme on other hand it felt nice and quite refreshing.

 

Hey, no problem. We do want the UI to look as best as possible, after all!

I'm wondering what your goals with the redesign are. Usability, looks, beginner friendlyness, whatnot. If you have some clear goals (and I hope you do), it'll be easier for us to tell if we feel like you're reaching them or not.

Side-note.
There's some issues with the UI that hasn't changed between the two alternatives, but should still be looked into. For example, there was a user the other day that posted a thread about how they wanted to make a game with Cherokee text. Now, making that work in-game isn't hard; just get a font that supports that Unicode-block, slap it onto your Text component, done. But entering the text into the same Text component will be a major pain as the font used in the editor UI doesn't support that, so it'll just show as a bunch of spaces. Same goes for Text Mesh Pro.

So that user has to have some script that runs on editor startup that goes through GUI.skin, finds all the font references, and updates those values. That's really hard, and brittle, and hard to understand, and not really supported?

So no matter what font you land on (please not the current shown one), having the ability to set the editor font in the preferences menu would help a lot when working with more esoteric parts of the Unicode block. It'd also let people adjust the font to their liking, which is a bonus for everyone.

 

Hi @benoitd_unity

I have noticed there are some minor misalignments when using toolbars which didn't happen in earlier versions:



To to the left you can see 2 images of toolbars stacked on top of each other in 2018. To the right, the same toolbars in 2019. The red arrows show some minor misalignments even though all toolbar buttons use a GUILayout.Width option of the same size. Would be great if this was fixed somewhow

EDIT: images also look a lot better in 2018.

 

It's nonsensical to remove a feature just because some people can't or don't want to use it.

Agreed. Complaining about arbitrary features is definitely a trait that feels very unique to this community.

 

In all honestly it causes more problems than it is worth and dark theme is widely received as a petty feature restriction.

 

I'll agree that it is a petty feature restriction.

 

Not a fan of flattening of UI elements but I can live with it. Dropdowns could have some gradient. Sliders look much better.

Anyway, way worse is the text rendering. Is this a PC font rendering problem? I't just, not good. I'm sorry.
Small anti aliased fonts are hard to read in every case and the AA produces blur and not crispness.

When I'm using Unity on a Mac for IOS builds I've always noticed the extremely crisp font rendering. No percieved pixels or bluriness. I never see such good font rendering on windows. Is this related?

 

1. The new icons are either the same (4-way arrow) or much MUCH harder to read than the old ones. This is a huge step backwards (e.g. the "X" icon in fields is truly terrible - there is no way I can see that on my 4k monitor. The old icon was great, worked perfectly, why break it?)
2. The flat style looks pretty ...
3. ... but making dropdowns and fields look identical is a big step backwards. It is MUCH harder to work on large projects with complex inspectors.

Overall: while I like the prettiness, this appears to have been designed without any thought for usability (removing visual info like dropdown vs field! Making icons much less distinct!), which should be the number 1 goal, I would have thought?

 

I don't feel like this is fixing any problems, which is a shame.

I very much agree with other people's comments about the flat design being less useable. Making something look modern should not come at the expense of useability.

But the bigger issue for me is the size of the UI elements. Unity has always had tiny buttons, but much of the new UI feels even smaller.

Sadly, I'm not getting any younger, and my eyesight is going to get worse as time goes on. Unity 2020 shouldn't require 20:20 vision.

Perhaps this is the first step in moving to a scalable UI? I hope so! Even the ability to adjust the default text size would be amazing.


While I'm at it, perhaps you could make use of colour a little more? If you're going to use a blue highlight, why not use it to improve usability? The play button down state would look much better with a blue background, and it would alleviate the problem of not realising when you're in play mode.

Or what about the new GameObject cube icon. Why not change the colour labels/tags to coloured cubes, and mirror the colour in the hierarchy panel (I can't see a point of all those grey cube icons otherwise).


Consistency is another thing that bugs me. Why do some drop downs have rounded corners & others have square corners. Why do some buttons have a black border, while others have a grey border. Why is the Layers dropdown different (and why is that eye icon so aweful). What do the colours of icons mean? Is there any logic system behind them? The little arrow in the scale icon is smaller than the arrows on the move icon & rotate icon. If you made it the same size, I reckon the icon would be much more readable. Little details I realise, but fixing them would make things just that little bit less annoying/weird.

 

Haven't had the chance to try this, but please don't make the font smaller! It's hard enough to read as it is (Windows 10). Ideally editor UI scaling would be great but I don't imagine that is coming anytime soon?

 

I'm very happy with the slightly larger lock button. It looks white in the new theme, which helps it stand out. Does it turn red when locked? Because that would be excellent.

 

UI has been on my mind for some time now. I'm a UX Designer for an application we're building in-house within Unity and the standard UI elements can be problematic, especially in a situation like ours where we have LOTS of information being shown with multiple scripts attached to gameobjects.

Some thoughts:

1. Overall, it's clearer without the gradients and hi-lights, the contrast of the text is much better and clearer from a distance. It also appears that there is better spacing between rows.

2. Without the inset drop shadow on text fields, it's hard to tell the difference between it and a dropdown. Perhaps a slight outline or making the grey value inside the field slightly darker to differentiate it from other similar elements?

3. Why does everything have to span the window?

Why is this important?

Negative space helps readability and recognition.

In many situations, number fields will never have more than 1 or 2 place numbers, couldn't these generally be set to expand to fit a larger number only when necessary? Same is true with Dropdowns, if your options are: On/Off, why is it still so long? Perhaps having 3 size versions by default would help? It also helps users understand what the expected input is, which might be desirable for some functions.

It makes it hard to scan the list and the lack of negative space creates a homogenous interface for every inspector panel.

The same could be said for all of the UI elements. If it doesn't need to be 64 characters long, why set it to that?

In this mockup, dropdowns are only as wide as the text of the longest option - eg Cast Shadows can fit "Shadows Only":

1. Input fields are set to be closer to expected input, in this case 3 places can fit, but should expand for a larger number.
2. Dropdowns are the same style
3. Input fields have a small inset shadow.
4 . I left the array "Element 0" and "Anchor Override" object field the same size.

 

I add that Console logs look terrible when we bold text.

 

This is near perfect. Easy to identify elements you are after.

 

It seriously need an increased font size, even better an option to let the user choose the font sizes, it's way too small.

On the Lightning tab, if you look at the Scene/Realtime Lightmaps/Baked Lightmaps tab, the selected tab is hard to read because it gets black font on dark gray background.

But really, customizable font size should be number 1 priority now, just stop everything else and add this option, especially before releasing this new editor to the wild


Also : https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/change-font-size-in-unity-editor

 

I've also noticed severe lag on the inspector drawer. Not sure if that needs to be discussed here, but same drawer on any other version doesn't have any lag at all.

Edit:
Made a quick video showing the lag. Note that I made huge lists so that it's easier to see, but the lag is present even with smaller drawers.

 

I don't care at all the new UI, only I ask you guys to make it lightweight and well performant.

Please don't turn Unity into an unusable program.

 

1) Hope you guys fix the spacing on this. It triggers.



2) The profiler background gradient doesn't fit with the overall look and feel



3) The flat design of the editor really accentuates misaligned elements in custom editors even off by a pixel. This makes it easier to spot mistakes. Thank you.

 

I am not a fan of the flattened look. My key concerns:

• Buttons and drop downs and other "click to actuate" things look the same as text fields, making the entire thing harder to parse quickly
• There are fewer borders on things, reducing readability for me
• Lower contrast overall, which makes it harder to read/detect elements and boundaries
• The new icons are mostly fine

Please keep clicky things looking clicky. High contrast elements are so important for a lot of people. "Dark gray on slightly darker gray with little to no borders" is not going to be helpful or increase efficiency.

 

Interesting! Is there any chance we will be able to set font sizes and colors ourselves?

I really like in Blender how you can rescale certain panels just with the mouse, but I assume that’s something completely different, but the customization in Blender is really awesome.

I switch a lot between a 15” MacBook and a 5K monitor and in some cases it would have helped to change the font size to see things more clearly or make it smaller to allow more text on screen.

I might have missed this, but when is this planned for release?

 

2019.1. But you can test it out today.

 

List of comments, sorry!:

These have been mentioned:

• it's difficult to tell the difference between input fields, buttons, text fields, dropdowns, etc, most of the affordances seem to have been removed without replacement. This makes it hard to scan for functionality. Buttons are a little lost, but it's seemingly a tinting issue for them - the Add Component button is discoverable.
  
• Poor text rendering in places
• Particle System UI is unusable.

• Add a line between the last Component and the Add Component button.
• The EventSystem icon looks like an audio icon, regardless of the icon's colour. The old one was fine!
• I love the top bar, it's clean as hell and the icons are all much improved!
• The lock icon is a lot clearer, this is great!
• The left side of the toolbars in general (Console window, Scene & Game toolbars, etc) needs spacing
• Timeline window needs a line between the top bar and the timeline frames/time
• The Animation Track icon looks like a warning icon and needs a rework
• The documentation/help icon is muuuuch better, lovely work.
• When toggling in-scene gizmos the dropdown disappears when active.
• Range sliders have not been implemented and are very difficult to use.

Overall I think it's a step in the right direction, just small niggling issues amongst the larger affordance problems. I'm gonna put myself down for... new if things become easier to parse from a glance.
Only if these issues are solved can I actually vote for that though, so I will refrain from the poll.
(I am using the pro theme)