I am new to Ignition, and while going through the Ignition Designer platform, I am completely baffled by its outdated design and extremely tiny fonts and icons. My eyes have to work extra hard just to look at the tree directory and the menus.
To make matters worse, I just found out there is no easy way to enlarge or edit the font and icon sizes globally. Why are platforms like these always years behind modern applications? Why do their UI/UX designers stick to these outdated, 90s-looking Windows operating system interfaces?
Yes, I’m using high-resolution Dell monitors. I actually found your answer while searching Google for a solution to this.
My main issue is that the Designer UI text, tree items, menus, and icons are simply too small for comfortable everyday use. I’d like an easy way to increase the font and icon size globally without having to depend on Windows scaling tricks or workarounds.
For a development environment where people may spend many hours a day looking at the screen, I’m surprised there isn’t a straightforward accessibility/display setting for this. Modern IDEs usually make it very easy to adjust UI scaling, font size, and sometimes icon size.
So it may partly be related to high-resolution displays, but I still think Ignition Designer should provide a developer-friendly way to control the UI size directly.
Also, the interface is just extremely bright, basically dead white, which makes even harder on the eyes.
I’m genuinely curious whether professional Ignition developers actually use the Designer like this for day-to-day real-world development??, or if there is some other setup, theme, scaling method, or workflow that experienced developers normally use. I’m honestly baffled that a development platform doesn’t have easier display and accessibility controls.
Maybe I'm just used to the designer as it is. It's certainly a lot more modern that it used to be from the v7.x era. I don't have any issues with the sizes of things though. I use a 2K 27" monitor ordinarily, set to 100% scaling factor. I've used 4K 27" at 100% as well, but it's a bit too small to be comfortable long term.
Haha, maybe I’m just too used to modern development tools.
Even if the Designer has improved a lot since the 7.x days, I still feel like the UI/UX could use another modernization pass. Surely the developers use today’s IDEs and applications too, so they must see how much easier things like scaling, themes, font sizing, and icon sizing can be.
Honestly, I’d happily help redesign it. Inductive Automation, hire me.
All other comments aside, you are coming into a platform with zero experience and telling an established user base that what they are happily using is wrong and bad.
If you had more experience in the field, you would understand how little the UI design really matters to most of the users given that the competition in the market has a reputation for exceptionally poor interface design as the priority is stability and features.
I would prefer that IA keeps prioritising features and stability, the last thing we need is V$ code and the poor stability of that sort of platform.
Yes, much of why it looks the way it looks is because it's a 20 year old codebase written in Java Swing, and it will probably always be Java Swing.
It could use a look and feel update. I'd love to get us moved to FlatLaf, which is what decent looking Java applications like JProfiler use, but any LaF change has implications for Vision.
Modern developer conveniences when it comes to editing are another story.
That said... it's not very far off from a lot of other high information density professional desktop software.
I actually think the “new user vs established user” comparison is the interesting part here.
Established users naturally get used to a platform over time. New users notice friction immediately because they haven’t adapted to it yet. That doesn’t automatically make the new user wrong — sometimes fresh eyes are exactly what reveal usability problems that long-time users no longer notice.
I also wonder whether many established users in this industry simply haven’t had much exposure to modern software-development IDEs and tooling. If you spend most of your career inside industrial software, maybe this interface feels completely normal. Coming from software development, though, the difference is very noticeable.
And that is really my broader point: why does so much industrial automation software still seem visually and ergonomically stuck in the old Windows-style UI world? Tiny icons, tiny tree text, bright white interfaces, limited theming, awkward scaling, these are problems modern IDEs have largely solved already.
I’m clearly not the first person to notice it either. I found several similar complaints while searching Google; I just happened to land on the earlier answer in this thread.
I’m not saying stability and features don’t matter. Of course they do. But UI/UX, accessibility, scaling, readability, and stability are not mutually exclusive. A mature engineering platform should be able to improve one without sacrificing the other.
So no offense intended. I’m genuinely curious why this whole category of industrial software seems so far behind mainstream development tools in UI/UX. Problem solving usually starts with curiosity about why users are struggling, not with defending the existing design because people have already learned to live with it.
Icon size
Small | Medium | Large
I'm not asking them to rewrite Ignition in JavaFX. Give the Designer a dark background, sensible font scaling and a few UI-size options
That said... it's not very far off from a lot of other high information density professional desktop software.. Let's name what is out there.. for me like Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, VS Code, Blender, CAD applications, Photoshop Adobe Lightroom, Postgre SQL, MySQL, MONGO db, oh Amazon online shop, Etsy online shop, all kinds of project management tools, I developed project management tool as well GITHUB to be added
