HIG discussion topic: always raise/frame all buttons?
Right now, some of our buttons are "raised" (buttonlike), and some are "flat" (just a floating icon and text):
The rules for when we raise vs make flat are not well-defined (see also #10). In general, the convention is that buttons on toolbars are flat, while buttons "on the page" are raised. But these guidelines are not always followed. Sometimes we use flat buttons on list items in views, (see above screenshot), but sometimes we don't:
And sometimes buttons in footers are raised, sometimes they aren't.
We should either come up with simple and comprehensible rules to determine raised-ness vs flat-ness, or else we need to choose one style and be consistent about it everywhere. Using all flat buttons does not really make sense because flat buttons can't work in views, where they would easily be mistaken for non-interactive text. They also don't work as overlay buttons on cards and images. So if we decide we want to do this, it would need to be all raised buttons.
However the original reason for not doing this was probably to avoid visual heaviness in windows with a lot of toolbar buttons all next to each other, so to counteract that, we would probably want to implement some kind of "conjoined" or "segmented" style we can use to group related controls to keep down the visual heaviness in toolbars where there tend to be a lot of buttons. Also, we could make buttons feel a bit more "sunken" or "embedded into the background" rather than looking like they visually pop up above the background.
Sort of like this: