Google recently changed all their app's icons to just letters, with a similar (identical?) coloring. Now instead of my email app looking like a clearly defined message icon, it's "M". Thanks Google
I guess it was the standard instant messaging system in grade school?
It's the same learning burden as any other icon for most people, but with the advantage that it actually means "send". (Though not in an online messaging context; that's 发.)
I disagree. Good icons are things that almost everyone in the world has seen before.
It exactly mirrors the old approach of using English words, except that it fits into the narrower space given to icons. And it is vastly superior to using icons, for the same reason that using English words is.
This stuff reminds me of mid-1980s monochrome Macintosh icons.
But users who are only starting to learn the ropes the classic big and colorful icons are a serious help. They are still available, just not made the default.
The half-red half-blue thing was the eraser. The yellow thing with a black dot was the clone stamp. The yellow stick was a pencil, the brown stick was a paintbrush, the red stick was an airbrush, the dark grey stick was the magic wand selector, the black bomb was the burn tool, and the white 45-degree square was the fill tool. The black A was the text tool, the blue A was the measure tool.
That's just how my brain works.
Anyway I realised you can change them back and now finding things is almost instant again. Eraser? -> Look for pink -> done.
The problem with that is that, sometimes, the user is looking for UI elements. I don’t see us build an AI that detects that and makes icons more colorful/distinctive (and don’t even know whether that would be a good idea), so I guess the ideal is somewhere in-between: icons that are neither too bland nor too colorful.
I'm not saying that we should all aim for maximum information per pixel or anything, just that we not be wasteful like what I've seen recently. It's maddening.