That could be great, but as there are several types of color blindness it’s hard to have one set of colors for everyone. I don’t know if it would difficult to have something like in new video games that are shipping with color presets for colorblind people, maybe we could have presets only for icon colors ? But it’s maybe over the top haha
edit : could be an addon maybe
Exactly. It’s one of the nice things about this being a theme option. Various types of color blindness can be accounted for by adjusting the theme.
I know it’s marginal, but in the bright backgrounds, currently the lack of black contours to the icons gets this effect … and I’m picky but I do not like being forced to use black icons 
Specifying readable icon colours will now be a theme setting, and so part of the theme itself. It’s up to whoever creates a theme to make sure that icons are easily visible by picking colours with enough contrast.
I will be silenced to make other comments on the icons until the next level of more solid development
as much as I wanted to point out I have already highlighted it
Somewhere in between, a quick code hack to see what it would look like. I’m working on a proper implementation
It seems like a good idea to use more saturated colors and text colors to indicate selection and active object, but that would be done after we get the coloring to a good enough level to commit the new icons.
I think the use of Curly Braces might be a better clue than the “|” character for people to guess what that collapsed item means, they have things inside. It’s just a mockup test (use Brecht’s capture as base image).
What do you guys think?
Nice and solid design ! i agree with most of your ideas but understand the need for color,maybe something very subtle.
Im affraid that those bars (especially the culy ones) add unnecessary visual noise with no purpose, since arrows on the left sufficiently indicates if the stack is expanded or collapsed.
Maybe because of the color?, something more tenuous will attract less attention, is that I think it is more clarifying those signs than a vertical bar, but it can be that it is killing flies with cannon shots.
The idea of using braces isnt bad, it feels kinda good visually. But I think the shape is too busy and the color is too bright.
Try simple brackets [ ] and a more subtle color!
Well - sorry to say so, but I find it as a problem that doesn’t really exist. We should focus on reducing additional
info rather than adding new decorators. Outliner is overloaded with information right now.
I’m trying hard to figure out how to manage all the necessary information in pleasant yet efficient and unobrtusive way. Not an easy task.
@brecht or @billrey - is it possible to get the font Blender uses in Outliner? I’d like to make some mockups, and it will be faster to draw them directly in Inkscape, than to paint over in Gimp.
Tried to make a quick mockup and in the process I found that using nothing at all looks really clean…
That’s the way to go! Although You should keep an eye on me, just to make sure I don’t remove too much. Colour for instance 
Maybe some removal is a good idea, it cleans things up!
Heh… that’s what I thought about. Stop reading my mind!
Let’s pimp up the Outliner!
The first shy attempt to tame all the info in the composition:
I found that differntiation between Selected-but-not-active Object and Data-under-edition / Editable-now-Data, is not important. I got rid of this additional state, especially because “Selected” state is limited to Objects. I bet You can point out with no effort, which data is Active, which data blocks are editable and which rows in Otliner’s grid are selected in my mockup. All is clear, informative and pleasant to look at at the same time.
Colours are quite random, but that’s not the point.
BTW - is it possible to invert (make black) icons on buttons that have been turned on (highlighted)?
Tried to add 2 extra pixels per row. I think it looks less crammed and also helps aiming on large monitors.
A porposition to make rows a bit wider is superb - it makes the stack more readable IMHO.
