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Making Themes
Contents
Introduction
In Short
Tools
Button States
General Styles
Main Controls
Secondary Controls
Fullscreen
Volume/Mute
Subtitles
Playlist Controls
Toolbar
Icon List
Releasing
Credits
Licenses

Chapter 7. Secondary Controls

The secondary controls can be much harder than the main controls. All of the main control buttons are standard buttons with standard representations, even fairly intuitive representations. This is not so for the secondary controls. Included in the secondary controls are fullscreen, mute, unmute or volume, subtitles on, and subtitles off.

Fullscreen

This button, toggling between the vido being just in a window and taking up the entire screen, couldn't draw on the standards of VCRs, but it is in enough media players that a standard has developed. The most common fullscreen icon is four arrows pointing at the corners of a box, or just pointing outwards. This is about as good of a representation as can be found. Unlike with the play and fast forward arrows, I usually give fast forward arrows a tail, so the center of the box between them isn't a void. Otherwise, it looks somewhat like they are just triangular corners. As with any case of small pieces of an icon, make certain that every arrow is distinct.

Shortly, the fullscreen icon may have an alternate state of un-fullscreen. In this case, it will be an action button, not a state button, so the fullscreen icon will show when the video is not fullscreened and the unfullscreen icon will show when the video is fullscreened. On most displays this does not matter, because the fullscreen icon will be hidden by the movie being fullscreened. It is still visible on multi-screen displays with the controls on a seperate screen from the video. However, there is currently only one fullscreen icon state.

The fullscreen icon is named 'fullscreen'.

Fullscreen Examples:   fullscreen fullscreen fullscreen
Volume and Mute

Although not as obvious as the main controls, there is a definite standard for volume icons. Basically, they are designed to represent a speaker. There is a straight section leading into a triangle, or a cylinder into a cone if it were 3d. The triangle is usually thinner horizontally than an equilateral triangle. There are a couple ways to denote the difference from muting, however. The two ways I have used are have the volume icon be covered with an X or some other symbol of cancellation, and having three lines appear coming out of the triangle when it is not mutes, and removing those three lines, representing sound, when it is changed to mute.

When making this icon, you need to remember that it shows state as much as what the button does. As such, the icon is 'mute' when the volume is muted, not when pressing the button will cause the volume to be muted. This is different from a lot of buttons. For example, a 'play/pause' button exists in many media players, where the icon is play when the video is not playing and switches to pause when the video starts playing.

The volume icon is named 'volume' and the mute icon is named 'mute'.

Volume Examples:   volume volume volume
Mute Examples:   mute mute mute
Subtitles

The subtitles button has two states: Subtitles On and Subtitles Off. I have found no standard icon for a subtitles button, so I've just been trying things out. The easier to understand ones just use text, such as 'Subs', then crossing out the word when they are off, or just have the words 'Subs On' and 'Subs Off'. Unfortunately, using words makes for very wide icons. Most icons are almost square. For example, all of The Blues set is 35 pixels tall, and most of them range from 33 to 40 pixels wide. However, the subtitles button, because it uses text, is 50 pixels wide. It is really too big for the set.

Since then, I have found one icon which can represent subtitles: having a speaker with words coming out for on or nothing coming out for off. There are several problems with this: the subtitles icon is beside the volume/mute icon, the lines of text often resemble sound lines from a volume icon, and it is not commonly enough used that people recognize it anyway. I just smallify and tilt the speaker to differentiate from the volume icon, but it might be better to have words coming from a mouth or have the mouth closed.

As with the volume/mute button, the subtitles button shows state, not action, so it will say 'Subs On' when the subtitles are on and 'Subs Off' when the subtitles are off.

The subtitles icon is named 'subtitles' and the subtitles are off icon is named 'nosubtitles'.

Subs On Examples:   subtitles subtitles subtitles
Subs Off Examples:   nosubtitles nosubtitles nosubtitles

 
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