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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

If I could lodge a complaint to all the UI designers: please stop making all the icons look the same in order for them to have the same "style." If I'm looking at a grid of essentially identical white-on-black pictograms with overlapping forms composed entirely of outlines with no variation in thickness or stroke, then you might as well just use actual words at that point.

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In icon sets, variations in stroke thickness is a bad idea, without changing the context. People who can't evaluate design issues would simply categorise the product as "something's off here", or "I don't trust this". Your iconography has an impact at a deeper level.

That doesn't invalidate GP's points. A collection of B&W icons with similar base shapes (circle, square, rectangle) and no contrast is terrible for using the interface. Each icon needs a distinctive element, be it color, weight or shape, to make it stand out from the other icons near it.

If you're designing a B&W icon set, at least make sure that each one has a very eye-catchinge, different outline.

I miss recognizable colors, and clear silhouettes.

Too many icons now are monochrome squiggles and blobs on a (rounded) rectangle silhouette. About as horrible as it can get.

For real! GIMP became almost unusable for me when they introduced that monochrome icon theme, although luckily you can switch back in the options menu (for now at least). Colors are an important part of making icons recognizable at a glance, especially when you have a ton of them in one place.

As a general rule icons take up less horizontal space than actual words describing what they do, which is why designers prefer to use icons.

Word Wrap. Amateurs.

Seconded. Most recently I saw they'd done this to Blender (2.8) but it's happening everywhere.

here f'n here.

Most of the time text would be more useful than iconography. Even when you don't understand the language, text and iconography are about the same - some squiggly lines that mean nothing, that you have to attach meaning to.

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