I partially agree, but it's also about versatility. Icons should be recognisable is a multitude of sizes and themes. The problem is that simpler icons have a steeper learning curve. Less tech savy people can't possible understand what many, or even most icons are supposed to mean. The app im typing this right now has a sort of paper plane icon on top. When did paper planes become "send"? My parents would certainly miss that metaphor.

> When did paper planes become "send"?

I guess it was the standard instant messaging system in grade school?

Should be a messily crumbled paper ball. Maybe we can use this for heavy hitting spam instead, ha!

I say "send" should be 寄. ;D

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.)

> It's the same learning burden as any other icon for most people

I disagree. Good icons are things that almost everyone in the world has seen before.

There aren't enough of those. We're already well past the point where icons are completely inscrutable, even in applications intended solely for a monolingual user base.

So at least having half of them scrutable is surely better than forcing the entire world to learn Chinese.

This approach does not involve forcing the entire world to learn Chinese. It involves a bunch of written vocabulary words.

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.

I'm seeing this too. The new GIMP icons are monochrome and also utterly unusable.

This stuff reminds me of mid-1980s monochrome Macintosh icons.

The new Gimp icons are fine for experienced users (like myself) who only need a faint pointer to the function if the tool. I use shortcuts for most of them anyway.

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.

I use GIMP enough that I would call myself experienced, but I don't generally identify icons by shapes, I'm used to identifying almost all icons by color.

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.

I'm reasonably experienced with GIMP and I find them useless. It's seriously difficult to quickly pick out the icon I'm looking for even if I know what it looks like. Even months (years?) after they changed the icons I was still finding myself spending seconds or literally tens of seconds sometimes trying to find the right icon.

Anyway I realised you can change them back and now finding things is almost instant again. Eraser? -> Look for pink -> done.

Because marketers have to justify their own jobs, and doing so involves promoting change for the sake of change. Frankly I'm amazed they're still breathing oxygen and not methane, having an oxidizing metabolism is so 90s.

Those aren’t exactly app icons though. They’re more like buttons, and I actually like buttons having a uniform look. It helps consistency and declutters interfaces.

The argument for restricting the use of color/animation/sound in UI elements is that you don’t want to have the icons distract from the content.

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.

This justification makes no sense to me. Icons aren't window dressing, they serve an actual functional purpose (identifying things that you can click on to perform actions). Removing color and making them all look similar makes them worse at their intended functional purpose.

In Windows 95-98, toolbar icons were grayscale until you hover on them. It was a good idea.

If this https://github.com/microsoft/fluentui-system-icons/issues/52 is addressed, then at least any developer can choose to set their own fill colors.

And let's not forget, we all have high resolution displays and what do we use it for? Whitespace.

So many pixels are wasted on the goofy super magnified trends of today. I really wish we weren't so wasteful of screen space, most of the time.

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.

If you have colorful icons you'll need to duplicate the resources to account for light and dark variants unless you prefer sub-optimal legibility. If you emphasize color as a method of representing state you'll need to adjust by shipping images for each state value. With monochrome icons the emphasis is placed on shape so you can efficiently render the whole icon in a different color without obfuscating its meaning.