While this could be a good idea, to me it would make more sense to separate elements of only a selection of icons.
There could be a selection (as small as possible) of colours chosen to mean something throughout the whole interface, as we currently have in the outliner, and each colour could be a separate layer in the svg.
A bit more complex to figure out probably, but the result would be far more consinstent imho.
Hmmm, it think a lot of people are here willing to design/color them, including me.
But yes, the implementation has to be done.
@Harley approach seems to be a good direction. Flexible and not to difficult.
Nope, from my experience and as you can read above, Institute is waiting for an outsider to make the patch. Then, if it fits nicely, maybe it will be considered and become part of the master. Itâs nothing new. Years passing by⌠nothing really changes. Incoherence is the trademark. Why am using custom build and it looks like weâll have a meeting at the end of the universe.
Even all this 2.8 stuff is gimmicky to my perception, skill set & flow â modernized headlights, bumpers, different secondary engine, buttons⌠while time to adapt again, consumption and emissions went higher. Am not buying into these. Would love to be wrong, but the river still runs red.
I would love to believe professional computer engineerâs goal is to engineer the mechanics â leave design to designers and customization to users. As it looks, itâs hard to do just that and time (resources) are wasted on conforming to subjective styles, tastes⌠designing uniforms.
BTW
Icons feel better than before and were easy to read, remember & adapt.
I actually think there should be multiple colors. My agreement on âone colorâ is the notion of there being one other color max per icon. But across different icons, what they are meant to do should be ideally consistent throughout.
For instance:
But whatever they are meant to represent, they should consistently represent, so that when the user is scanning with his eyes, the colors aid in finding desired buttons quickly.
I think usage of colors should be kept to a minimum so that itâs not just colors everywhere. But I also think some colors should be used to break up a sea of white. Because, guaranteed, in a sea of white symbols, 
will focus the userâs eyes.
Institute is waiting for an outsider because doesnât have money to hire as many programmers as it would like to have. Simple as that. Code quest was nice, but it a small piece of what Blenders need because there was not enough money to make it last longer or hire more people. I like Blender 2.8 much more than 2.79 and from some time now Iâm using it as a daily driver. 2.79 is just for doing stuff that is not finished in 2.8 and then I append them to 2.8. There is no way to make everyone happy. Brecht gave us a link few posts earlier from the time when 2.5 were released. At the time, there was the same crying about it - new icons are bad, canât work with them, there are not clear etc. I like the idea about icons being dual color, not monochrome, but Iâm just fine with monochrome as well.
And that is why developers didnât do the icons, yet they didnât do anything to customize UI simply.
To master something, anything - one must be objective.
Whoâs crying?
People are providing feedback.
The feedback in this thread and in most of the replies in that link are different.
2.49-2.5 most people argued particular icons were better or worse, or complained about the new icons without providing any deep feedback or reasoning.
People here are providing feedback, suggestions, and most importantly specific reasons why the new icons are worse. I havenât seen anyone in here complain that the reason theyâre unhappy is because they have to learn a new icon set. People are not just complaining that things are new.
Again, because there were and still are more important things to do than UI customizations IMHO. I can work just fine with Blender right now. Iâd like to see more optimizations, more rendering algorithms etc. I donâ mind UI customization, but it is not that important for me.
Quotes from comments to 2.5 icons:
Bad icons, low contrast between the different icons, not easily distinguishable.
I think the old icons are better.
These new icons are looks good but the old ones are easy to recognize.
The old icons are BETTER ! Why you are changing something what is good ?
New icons are difficult to recognise.
Blender should be usefull ! Not pretty
If it ainât broke - donât fix it. This simply seems like change for the sake of changeâŚ
etc. Sounds familiar?
There is no way to make everyone happy.
I guess we have bad communication here.
Itâs not for them to customize UI but to better the mechanics thus opening a window of opportunity for designers & market for all different possibilities that come to mind as a âfluent UI flowâ.
This thread present is such example VS 2.5.
Repeating the same, just moving stuff around⌠for how many more times? Thatâs the waste.
Also, Engineering & Design are already by definitions not the same things.
All very short messages without a whole lot of reasoning behind them.
Completely different to a bunch of the feedback in this thread.
Letâs back to meritum - I need ideas for these icons:
Thx in advance.
I think many people here are forgetting to account for some psychological biases we naturally have when giving advice and feedback.
The current (2.7x) icons make more sense because youâve already established meaning behind them. To me, ć means month. Why? Because I learnt that it means month. If you donât know the asian languages which use this character, you wouldnât have this connection. This makes new things always seem worse/less understandable/less pleasant. Keep this in mind when giving feedback. Compare the icons with your own new examples. We canât take away the ingrained âintuitivenessâ of the current icons, so we canât use them to form comparisons without bias.
After using the new icons, I have found them much more pleasant and easy on the eye. Texture + form takes more cognitive load to process than just simple forms (solid or line shapes) so as long as there isnât information lost in simplifying (there isnât in the proposed change) simpler icons are almost always going to be better*. Colour shouldnât be required for identification, but should present secondary information, as has been suggested by @jendrzych. I think I read this was also his motivation behind creating all the icons in white first, before adding colour. This is standard in the industry and definitely helps to create meaningful forms rather than falling back on colour to convey meaning.
I commend him on his work on these icons, making them varied but consistent. I feel most people donât see that a lot of the work is actually in coming up with the guidelines and concepts, not just drawing each icon. This work grows as the collection of icons does, and this is what makes a set of icons consistent and easy on the eye. It uses the âlearn once use anywhereâ concept which is invaluable in making an easy interface.
* Iâm taking better to mean lower cognitive load and quicker identification. This is testable by, for example, testing 100 users tasked with completing particular interactions with the new and old icons. Unfortunately there isnât enough coordinated management of blender to allow for this sort of testing so the best we have is personal guesses and opinions.
Iâve been doing color coding tweaks for the new icons and will continue until theyâre good enough. What I donât expect will be particularly important is going back to the old icons or customizable icon sets, because it seems unlikely they will be maintained over the long term. I want to evaluate that part once we are finished tweaking the new icons and some time has passed for users to get used to them.
The main complaints I see are about the properties header and file browser, where like the outliner thereâs a lot of icons close together. So we could add color coding in just those places perhaps? Adding more spacing for the properties header will also go a long way I think.
I wouldnât mind seeing some mockups for the properties header and file browser with color coding, ideally for both light and dark themes. The current mockups only have two colors for all icons, or color coding that doesnât have any clear categories.
At a minimum, color should also be used whenever icons are also indicators. For example, itâs currently hard to tell if edit mode proportional editing is on or off since the icon is ambiguous.
That could also just be solved by making the difference clearer between the on/off state of the proportional editing icon.
Thatâs the right way to do it. On my To-Do now.
As long as itâs not ambiguous, sure. Currently, with just the brightness being different, itâs not obvious. Does brighter mean âonâ? Or does darker mean âonâ? How can you tell if the brighter or darker icon is being displayed without the rest of the icon states being presented side by side?
This sort of thing, ideally should be obvious without interacting, but really as long as it is consistent you only need to learn that bright means active once.
Mockup with two variants for Warp modifier:
