The GIMP is a work of art, but let's face it. The GIMP's toolbar is big. It's HUGE. The buttons look pretty good, but what's the use of nice looking buttons if they take up too much space on your screen?

We could just sit around and complain about it. Until now, that's what we did. But now, we're making an effort to do something about it! That's right. GIMP News and the OpenGIMP Virtual Intranet-Aware Corporate Solutions Group are officially sponsoring the Great Toolbar Reduction Contest.

Our aim is to completely replace the nice-looking but much-too-big buttons that GIMP uses right now with some equally nice looking smaller buttons. The eventual goal is to produce a compact, good looking, and functional toolbar. That's why we want YOU, the artist that you are, to take a shot at making some buttons that fit inside 24x24 pixels and are all the same size. For example, take a look at Photoshop's button bar on the right hand side of this page. It's a pretty good example of the sort of thing we're looking for. Except ours will look much nicer :).

To submit your replacement buttons, email me a gzipped tar file of all 21 buttons. Please make them either XPMs or GIFs. When we have accumulated more than one entry, we will put a voting page in place where you can choose your favorite button set!

And for you folks who like the toolbar just as it is, that's fine too...we're don't pretend to be any sort of official S&P sanctioned event and we won't force anyone to use any toolbar we might come up with. We just want to try and make a good toolbar a little better.

What does the winner win? Well, the prize is a free subscription to the Web version of GIMP news! That's right, you'll have access to the premier GIMP news agency, all on the web, for free! Now get those entries in!

Comments

We've had some feedback, finally!

make the gimp toolbar one column vertical, small enough to fit on 768 Y pixels.

That's an interesting thought...21 buttons that were 24 pixels high would still be smaller than the current toolbar.

From several people (paraphrased): Why not make buttons have popup menus to choose from, such as a popup menu for all the selection tools or drawing tools? This would be a big space saver.

I think this idea has a lot of merit as well...several commercial programs handle it in this manner.

Several people have written to say that they aren't too particular what changes, as long as you can configure the changes at runtime for what you like. Also, the modifying the layout of the toolbar has come up as well; suggestions of being able to modify the dimensions of the toolbar to 1x24, 2x12, 3x8, 4x6, etc. have been given as possible configuration options.

The idea of a toolbar that pops up when a hotkey is pressed has been raised.