> This is a very popular trend and a lot of programs are replacing their icons in this way, so it's obviously fine for most people, and I realize this is probably a niche accessibility need I have.

It's not a niche accessibility need, it's a universal accessibility need that's been commonly understood for decades. Insufficient differentiation is one of the factors that originally drove the increase of colour count (and later, as display hardware allowed it, resolution) in icons 30-ish years ago.

This trend is not driven by universal preference for monochromatic icons but by the cargo cult that UX has become.

This is only true if we pretend that UI design is largely about button-level optimization. Clearly it needs to work on the macro level as well, and it's not farfetched to assume that optimizing every button, icon and text label for their individual local maxima will result in an application that's overall too cluttered for anyone but the most experienced users.

This is not a binary thing. There is such a thing as an interface that is clean and uncluttered, while still using icons that are at least distinguishable from each other. Otherwise you get none of the benefits of an uncluttered interface -- e.g. you have to hover by each button and read the tooltip to find the right one, which is precisely the kind of thing a clean interface is meant to avoid in the first place.

Also, Blender is not a grocery list app. While disregarding novice users does result in an application that's impossible to learn and that's obviously bad, it's equally unproductive to optimize an interface for people who see it for the first time. Blender is the kind of application that you spend tens, if not hundreds of hours learning before using it productively (let alone professionally). That's the target audience you're designing for, not people who download it and uninstall it if they get bored in the first thirty seconds.

Sure, my comment is in response to the claim that monochrome icons are user-hostile and pushed by a cargo-culting UX profession.

Plenty of professional tools (Photoshop, Final Cut, Figma) have monochrome icons without it being a usability issue. These are all content creation tools, including Blender. The UI and content should not be fighting for attention. It's clear which of those two should primarily be on display.

I think it's entirely possible that Blender just has poor icons - but it seems demonstrably false that monochrome icons are inherently inaccessible.

My best guess is that Blenders real issue is a lack of structure and clear grouping. Providing the icons are in a logical place, it's easy enough to find the correct one, without them needing to be visually distinct on literally every dimension. But if there's no logic to the placement and the icon you're looking for could be one of thirty, then I agree that's an usability issue - just not that the icons are at fault.

There were some significant reorganizations from 2.7 -> 2.8, 2.8 -> 2.9, and again from 2.9 -> 3.0. It's upsetting to see this much churn over this short of a time for Blender.

Blender has always been very keyboard driven, but I don't use it often enough to have most of the shortcuts memorized. Even those seem to have changed, though. I'm sure there is a setting in the preferences to restore the old shortcuts, but it doesn't really feel like an appropriate thing to do with such a complex piece of software.

I know Blender has a "reputation" for being difficult to use. It used to be earned, over a decade ago, and it was indeed an impediment to getting new users. I felt like--as even just a casual user--Blender had hit a good sweet spot of organized, predictable, and powerful. It's just the very nature of 3D modelling to be complex, and it feels like most complaints about its interface these days are just from completely new people who don't understand this.

That seems to be one of the dangers of Free Software. Having no monetary barrier to entry, you get a LOT more first-time users. Without the sunk cost of having spent several thousand dollars on 3DS Max or similar, they don't have an emotional incentive to stick through the learning curve yet.

The add on market is really growing, and something like Fluent Power Tools add an amazing array of hard surfaces modeling, and easy to use.

Oh yeah. To be clear, I still love Blender. It's just that some of these changes (like different icons, moving property fields to different places, changing the default keyboard shortcuts), seem like they're coming from the wrong place. It can get hard to search for information about doing specific things in Blender and making sure the video you end up finding (cuz it's always a video, sigh) matches the version of Blender you're using.

I've spent so much time watching videos and being confused because the fields they show are not in the same place in the version I'm using. It's one of the reasons I choose to stick to the default preferences as much as possible: I don't use Blender often enough to know exactly what I'm doing all the time, so I want my system to match what other people are presenting.

I feel you, that does happen. My search usually adds the version number, to weed out that post from 2006 from Blender 2.25 :)

> all the Blender icons were replaced with monochromatic ones

GIMP did this too and it absolutely blows. Thankfully you can revert back to the "legacy" icons.

Is it a simple checkbox in the preferences dialogue or do I need to edit a config file for that?

It's in the preferences UI: Edit->Preferences->Interface->Icon Theme. There's 6 or so options in there.

Perhaps this will help you. https://blenderartists.org/t/would-you-like-the-colorful-2-7...

So there is no way to mod the tool bars so you can show the old icons?

I mean you could always swap out the assets and rebuild. The icons are compiled into the binary so there’s no easy way to swap them out without recompiling blender.

Wow! I thought it was just me. I find it incredibly difficult to read icons. Even small design changes throw me - the most annoying was the change in speaker icon across versions of Windows. The bigger the icon the less of a problem it is but those fiddly toolbar icons throw me all the time. I have mentioned this to a few folk but honestly thought I was on my own.

I too cannot deal with monochromatic icons. FYI, 2.9 did (re-)introduce color to many of the UI icons, which made it much easier to use for me than 2.8.

It makes perfect sense, we are (most humans) visual creatures and color adds an extra dimension of information. Your issue sounds quite legit.

You could look at using a streamdeck to avoid using the icons altogether.