ARC GIS icon size issues

[AndrewTaylor]

The ARCGIS ArcMap toobar icons were annoyingly small on my machine, so I changed my icon size to "Large Icons" (right click on toolbar area>Customize>Options>clicked on "Large Icons").

The problem is, the resultant large icons were too big and extremely pixelated and ugly.

ESRI should create a new set of toolbar icon images be created that weren't pixelated, and preferably a little smaller than the current ""Large Icons" selection.

[MichaelGrün]

Damn right! Please create larger and well resoluted icons.

[JohnKerkering1]

Compltely agree. As an instructor, I would like to integrate these icons into my tutorials and PowerPoint slides. The available crop of icons are much too small to be integrated into a PowerPoint and have them still be discernible to an audience. As they stand, they become too blurry and pixelated when stretched beyond 1 square inch.

[AlexanderGray]

This goes for developers too.  Making a useful icon in a 32X32 image is almost impossible.  This is so limitting!

[JohnDye]

Agree, this a pretty dumb issue for ESRI to let sit idle.

We do a lot of MXD customization so I investigated this. The issue really comes down to ArcGIS only having a single 16x16 iconset and simply upscaling those 16x16 icons to 32x32 when you select 'Large Icons' in the Customizations menu instead of switching out the iconset like any other decently written program on the face of the earth would do.

I had to resort to creating new 32x32 png icons and installing them on the toolbars and then saving that out as a custom 'Large Icons MXD'. 

I then whipped up a little AutoHotKey script, pulled the ArcMap Icon from the bin folder and created a 'ArcMap.exe' , that prompts whether to use large icons or small icons. If you pick large, it launches the large icons MXD, small, it launches the small icons MXD. 

It was a real pain and took a couple of months to recreate all of the icons I have thus far and there are still more icons for toolbars I don't have or rarely use which are missing from my set.

This is really, really, really stupid ESRI. Fix it.

[SteveRodriguez]

Agreed, with higher resolution monitors, this is a very annoying issue.  Seems exacerbated in Windows 10, if the icons are small, they're fuzzy, and when large, the look horrible.

[AlexanderGray]

Don't hold your breath, this is much improved in ArcGIS Pro so I doubt esri's going to double back and change this in ArcMap.

[SteveRodriguez]

Yeah that was the impression that I got from the conference. All the R&D and development will be going towards Pro. We’ll see 10.5 around the end of the year, but I think that’ll be it for a while.

I actually did find that if I increase my display size to 125% it made the small icons much easier to see, less fuzzy.

[KoryKramer]

ArcGIS Pro 2.9 offers a user interface scaling option: https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/get-started/user-interface-options.htm#ESRI_SECTION1_715C00...

See Ideas in ArcGIS Pro 2.9 for more ideas included in the release, and 4:04 for a quick demo.