The new icons are really difficult to read/view

[Nadia Burborough]

I find the new icons (issue type icons, labels, dates etc) really difficult to read. The icons with a background color were so much easier to view / easy to distinguish. Having very stylized icons might be lovely for a designer but I find it difficult to actually read and use every day.

[Wurm Peter]

Thank god they have no background color.
It was hard to distinguish between the issue color and the issue type icons background color.
When you have a parent issue picker, you see both next to each other: 

[Nadia Burborough]

Hi @Wurm Peter - I'm not following you. Are you saying having the epic icon not have color is easier to read?

[Wurm Peter]

In my screenshot you see two "icons": The first one is just blue. The second is a stylized purple lightning.
Now imagine the second would have a blue blackground. Now it would be harder to distinguish between those two.

[Nadia Burborough]

Understand you now. Yes I can see that could be difficult if they are the same color. I think having a more distinctive 'lightning bolt' (rather than the new almost square looking icon) would help to distinguish. 

[John Price]

Wait, that's a lightning bolt? I agree - it's pretty square.

[michelle_bachmann]

@Nadia Burborough - Agreed. As much as I hate a dark background, I turned it on so the icon outlines could be seen better. I'm not sure if I will leave it on since I do a lot of technical writing with screen shots and dark backgrounds have their own issues. (Ever see any instructions for Atlassian with a dark background? Nope!) 

[Nadia Burborough]

I'm personally not a fan of a dark background either - I couldn't keep that on for long! 

[Debbie Jolley]

totally agree Nadia...I went into my sandbox and turned the new 'improved' navigation on for a few seconds to see what you were referring to - and this is a direct comparison of really hard to read on a white background (not everyone can use dark mode - it causes me eye strain) vs nice and clear...

what I might do is see if I can download all the current clear icons before the change, then, once we're forced to update override the new stylised versions (ie change that serves absolutely no useful purpose) with the current clear versions that everyone understands...

[Nadia Burborough]

Really great comparison there. Now that I look at them like this, I can certainly see some improvements to readability (because the edges of the icons are unique, and not square boxes) - I guess I'm just missing the heavy use of color.

And when you add the lack of color on labels and dates, all of it feels like it's blending into one another and non-distinguishable.

[Anne Saunders]

Yeah...the new navigation generally does not seem to be ADA/Section 508 compliant for accessibility. The contrast is just too low. (See also workflow status category colors - To Do is good, Done is..okay, but In Progress gray on powder blue is nearly illegible)

I LOVE the shaped icons, but not the pastel colors of them.

[Martin Vali]

@Nadia Burborough put up some screenshots of what you mean exactly

[Nadia Burborough]

Debbie added the icons in her post above, which shows the comparison to the two icon sets. Based on that I updated my point of view to say I can see the benefit of the new icon sets, but just that I'm used to the heavy use of color, and now that it's not there I miss it.    

Here's a partial image of a ticket with labels and a date in the new format. These labels and date used to have a background color which I thought helped to give visual clarity. 

I'm getting used to things already though ... 

[Michele Colson]

I completely agree. The most frustrating part was replacing the icons for my custom issues with the same style.

[Anne Saunders]

@Michele Colson SAME! And now I get to do it again 😅

[James Rickards (Spark-Nel)]

On the poor-quality TV's we have in meeting rooms, the washed-out colours just disappear.  They need to have more saturation.

[Rick Westbrock]

I use dark mode and the new icons are definitely harder to pick out visually for me. In our sandbox tenant I switched to light mode and it's not any better. An example image below shows how the JSM icons are much easier to read:

I wonder why the JSM issue type icons were not refreshed along with the Jira icons.