{"id":543,"date":"2014-07-09T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2014\/07\/09\/why-are-only-some-of-the-windows-7-system-notification-icons-colorless\/"},"modified":"2014-07-09T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T14:00:00","slug":"why-are-only-some-of-the-windows-7-system-notification-icons-colorless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20140709-00\/?p=543","title":{"rendered":"Why are only some of the Windows 7 system notification icons colorless?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nAndr&eacute; decided to play &#8220;gotcha&#8221;\nby noting that\n<a HREF=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2012\/05\/07\/10301625.aspx#10301968\">\nnot all of the notification icons went colorless<\/a>\nand wondered what the criteria was for deciding which ones to make\ncolorless and which ones to make colorful.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nIt&#8217;s very simple:\nThe design team generated colorless versions of the most commonly-seen\nnotification icons.\nThey didn&#8217;t have the time to generate colorless versions of\n<i>all<\/i> notification icons,\nso they focused on the ones that gave them the most benefit.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThis is the standard tradeoff you have to make whenever you have\nfinite resources.\nEventually the marginal cost of redrawing <i>one more icon<\/i>\nexceeds its marginal benefit,\nat which point you stop.\nThe marginal cost is measured not only\nin actual resources (designers can redraw only so many\nicons per day, and you have money to hire only so many designers)\nbut also in opportunity cost (time spent redrawing icons to be colorless\nis time not spent on other design tasks).\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThis is the same reason that not all icons in Windows&nbsp;XP were\ngiven the full-color perspective-view treatment.\nFor example, nearly all of the icons in the\n<i>Administrative Tools<\/i> section are the old Windows 2000-style\n16-color flat (or isometric) icons.\nThe design team focused on the 100ish most commonly used icons\nand went to the effort of redrawing them in the Windows&nbsp;XP style.\nThe more rarely-used icons were left in the old style\nbecause the cost of converting them did not merit the benefit.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe same thing happened in Windows Vista,\nwhen the icon design changed yet again.\nThe style became less stylized and more realistic,\nbut not quite photorealistic,\nand the angle of presentation changed.\nThe design team had the resources to convert\nthe most commonly used icons,\nand the rest were left as they were.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nIt&#8217;s the Pareto Principle again.\nIf you have finite resources (and who doesn&#8217;t)\nyou may find that you can get 80% of the benefit by doing\nonly 20% of the work.\nAnd that leaves 80% of your capacity available to address\nsome other problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Diminishing returns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Diminishing returns.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}