EVE General Discussion

There was a dev blog for it. Failed troll attempt.

The new icons show size classes much better than the current icons in my opinion. I'm sure that within a week people will be used to the new icons and be finding them more helpful than what we have now; definitely a step forward I'd say.

"Visual noise" is (oddly counter-intuitive, but) exactly the phrase here. Less is indeed more.

I read that and was active back then responding to the devblog

This however is round 2, with totally new icons and no dev blog and only visible to those who log on to SISI.
Why back then where the new icons worthy of a dev blog and this time not?

Afraid that some would reject them again and say nice try, please keep iterating on it, maybe one day you'll get it right?

Yes there was a dev blog for this a little while ago. But the symbols portrayed on that dev blog were, in my opinion, far too similar to each other and would be hard to differentiate from ship to ship. The symbols in your link are easier to differentiate but whether people will like them is open to question. Personally I think the crosses we have are not too bad and do not distract whereas the ones you linked would maybe draw attention too much.

I missed the even older attempt that was silently on Sisi for a while years ago.

They had triangles for small, square for medium, and pentagon for large. I liked how simple it was.

These are good too though.

My only problem I can see in the screenshot is that industrials look far too much like a cruiser.

The current icons already allow for what you're talking about. The only issue is with destroyers and battlecruisers, which appear similar to frigates and cruisers. Mistaking the frigate icon for the battleship one does not seem very likely after your first trip in space, since the size difference is big enough to make a clear distinction: the frigate takes up very little space; the battleship one takes up all space. Cruisers might be a better argument there, but they're still easy enough to separate since they're not small, nor do they take up all the icon space available, or anything capital, since they don't have unique icons at all.

What the current icons have is a very clear and concise language that communicates one thing: the differentiation between S, M, and L-sized ships (with a bit of a special case for industrials). They perform this simple job admirably. What the new icons try to do is expand the language to include more information, most notably by adding different shapes. This iteration does it better than the last because it… well… uses different shapes rather than the same one with utterly minute decorations to communicate the relevant differences. So they're not really going after — or even solving — the problem you're describing, but rather a somewhat different but related one.

And yes, whether it's good or bad is a different matter — we can definitely say that it's better than the earlier attempt, though, exactly because they've now added some proper differentiation on the other information axes they want to include.