Wedge

I heard of a study, I think it was done by the military, on how to use symbols that the brain automagically recognizes for what they are meant to be without ever being taught.  I thought it was pretty cool.

But I like icons.

That leads into all kinds of interesting subjects like colour theory (especially when you factor in sociological and cultural factors). Generally, though, finding an image that is rather representative is enough because we're pretty good at making associations between things we've seen and things we encounter.

Meaning we should not make the icons monochromatic?

The most important thing is that they're representative and consistently used above all else.

Colour has two predominant factors to consider as far as we're concerned: usability and inference.

Usability because it's possible to have UI issues out of colour mismatches - not only pure legibility but I remember an issue that came up in Crimson Editor's development that had to be changed. Specifically, up until it got open sourced, you had tabs and a little lamp indicating whether the file had been saved or not since the last edit: red for unsaved changed, green for no changes since last save. Except that users with red/green colour blindness had real trouble differentiating them. (And R/G colour blindness is the most predominant form, more common in males, too)

Culture issues aren't a huge thing for us but it can be on some things. There was a really good UI overview document I found somewhere that explained it in a bit more depth.[1]

For example on page 43 it has an image that lists a pig, a US-style mailbox, the 'OK' gesture and a Red Cross logo, and goes on to say that the pig is likely offensive to multiple cultures, that US-style mailboxes are uncommon even unknown outside the US, the OK gesture is actually an offensive one in South America and the Red Cross logo is unfamiliar to many and that a cross has no significance to billions of people.[2]

More of interest is the table on page 44 listing different colours and their culture effects, that red for example is a warning colour in our perspective but that other colours see red as a colour of strength, anger or vibrancy. Interestingly the only colour that has positive connotations across the board is green.

Note that this doesn't mean we should change anything that we have, because for the users who will most likely use Wedge, they're in the Western Europe/US group, which generally means we have similar cultural connotations for colour (green = good, red = danger/bad, that sort of thing), but it is worth being aware of it, I find.

1.	http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~bockusd/3p94/webui1.pdf has the full thing for now, it's well worth a read even though it looks like it's years out of date, because the principles it talks about are still true now.
2.	I think there's a little exaggeration going on here, but the general point is valid.

Ah, color blindness... I never seem to be able to take that into consideration when doing my stuff.It's not really out of date, as .net Magazine published a few months ago an article on colors and their cultural impact. It seems to be using the same data but it explains it over a couple of pages. I understood from it that the only 'safe' colors to use are non-primary colors really... :PExactly -- we're building for the Western area. We can worry about the rest of the world later. ;)

Actually, none of your stuff seems to have contrast in the areas that typical colour blindness would have a problem with.I meant the UI document itself; it has all kinds of screenshots of very old institutions - it was last updated in 2003.Pretty much, yes.Good plan!

It's pure luck then! ;)