EVE Information Portal

Oh, and by the way: what will these look like when you cover them up with the standard set of overview- and bracket colourings and tags? How does a blue-listed, fleeted, S-flagged battleship look compared to a same-corp, fleeted, bountied cruiser?

Capital NPC ships confirmed!

But otherwise it looks good. Yes it'll take some time getting used to, but hey, so did the current icons when I first started.
But maybe you should consider making a seperate icon for super-carriers.. Since they're a group for themselves.

So +1 for a job well done.

I can't distinguish between small and medium size ships except (hardly) the size which differs very slightly, where previously the difference was obvious. Previous were simple and allowed fast decode of rough class of ships. To my opinion these are too much detailed and confuse decoding, I think I will probably have to frequently use text as fallback. XS icons are also identical to me, which is an issue since pod and shuttle are definitively not to consider the same.

Asteroid belt also looks like upside-down ship and could confuse

Same for Beacon, which looks like a destroyer

Mobile Reprocessing Array looks like a drone

Symbols above batteries are almost unreadable even after zooming (maybe due to the quality of the image ?)

Wormhole looks like the previous reactors arrays


I know that you have to update the icons, but assuming that everyone use Isis and get used to the icons is a not-so-obvious: I barely take attention to the icons since they are too complex and similar and they were not used outside except in ships infos where actually the real info is the list of stats under (so not taking account of it anyway, same issue with the "ammo" / "category" icons which are too much abstract. By the way I'm still confusing a lot with the new neocom, for example I can't make the difference between assets and inventory and miss the 2 regularly because the symbols don't mean to me). I know this is a matter of habit but let me also explain my feeling as I took a look at the overview.

I was not able to decode clearly except large/very large ships and some peculiar ones (like destroyers or freighter).

On the overview, having to analyze the difference of 3 pixels in the form of a flat or round roof or the orientation of a 3 pixels-wide exponent (ewar, npc), or the width which is 2 pixels more will be very tedious. In previous forms the size and the bold of the cross were different plus the color if NPC, that was only 3 things to compare. Now you have to compare shape, size, width, exponent, color, ... If you add background color or icons for status the amount of data to process is greatly increased. When some icons overlap it gets even worse. You may say that names of ships are still available but in this case that defeats the purpose of having "clear" icons to distinguish types ...

For young people with good vision it may not be an issue, but with older ones and/or with impaired vision which have issues distinguish this amount of detail, specially on medium-sized screens, I'm rather worried.

This argument feels like a straw man....

What % of your clientele do you believe will own 4k-5k monitors in that time...versus the number that will still be running just over min-specs?

Of those that will be running Eve on 4k-5k monitors, how many of them are doing it for the sole purpose of enlarging the icon column of their overview, versus the number that will have their overview take up the same space as now, but use the extra resolution for...SPACE SHIPS AND SPACE!

Is it just me or do the drone icons look like Space Invaders?

A few weeks ago a proposal was made to use the ISIS Icons as Brackets/OV Icons (in the German Features & Ideas forum). To showcase what those would look like when used with colortags, I created this mockup. It'll probably look pretty much like that.

Much too small, many are hard to distinguish and have to be memorized instead of being intuitive... and if you are going to such (unnecessary) extremes, why are sensor dampening battery and warp scramble battery the same icon?
And how does slightly increasing the size of the freight container matter?

Please keep the icon for guns, the new one doesn't make sense at all - except being the same base icon as the EW batteries.

That looks reasonable for the overview. I'm thinking more about the in-space brackets, where the differentiation they're going for here probably will change this to this…

…which raises yet another variation of the question “why?”, since that's where the distinctions will actually matter (well… except that people use filters to do the same thing, since that's a functionality that's more suited for the purpose).

After a second look I must say that I really like the battleship icon

After playing a little bit with it I noticed some things. Frigate and cruiser (not battlecruiser) icons are offset one pixel to the right. Cruiser and Battlecruiser icons are offset on pixel down.

It is even harder to recognise some items if there is an icon for standing/corp/alliance/etc.

As you can see in my mockup it is much easier to recognise the size if there is some kind of box/border or something to compare it to. Without some kind of relation it is hard to classify.

EDIT: And asuming the someone is used to this icons due to ISIS is pretty odd. I used a few times just to look at the ship lines, but never cared for or even really locked at the icons.

That's not really a solution, partly because it would defeat the purpose of giving a better overview of the field since less can be seen at once; partly because, if that's what you want, you can already turn on scaling.

No, the solution is to make them more distinct, more simplistic, and crystal clear when scaled-down on a low-res monitor — then add in (meaningless) decorations at higher resolutions if need be. In other words, almost the exact opposite of what's been done here.


Come to think of it, we've been here before, and the error was the exact same back then. When they tried to change the module icons to depictions, it made the icons useless and indistinct because… well… they weren't icons any more. Instead, they were just pictures of what they were meant to represent. Iconography does not rely on absolute, accurate portrayal — it relies on clarity of conveying an idea. You make icon easily distinguishable by making them distinct, not by cramming them full of tiny details.

You do not need a ship-shaped shape to represent a ship. Anything will do, as long as you can establish that “this represents a ship” and offer something that is uniquely recognisable enough that people don't forget it. When you try to represent 30 different ship types, you need to employ more than one shape to do so. Same with the 30+ different drone types.

So, solution: broaden the visual language; step away from simple depiction; start with the tiniest possible size and work up rather than the other way around; and stay the **** away from minute details as a way to convey meaning.