## Icons

A pin can carry an icon chosen from a library of about 1,750 — a fire
extinguisher, a plug socket, a first-aid cross. Pick one that names the
thing rather than decorating it: an icon a learner can read at a glance
saves them opening the pin to find out whether it is relevant.

## Colours

A context's colour is either one of the six house colours, which follow
whichever theme the experience is using, or one you add yourself to the
experience's own palette.

Two things about the palette are worth knowing:

- **A new context takes the first colour its scene is not already
  using.** Contexts are told apart by colour before anyone reads their
  names, so two identical ones would be worse than none.
- **Removing a colour from the palette repaints nothing.** It stops
  being offered to new contexts; every context already wearing it keeps
  it, and a version you published with it goes on looking the way it
  did. That is what makes the remove control safe to press.

## Where icons do not appear

Inside an activity — Wayfinding, Pin the Space, and the rest — pins are
drawn as plain markers, without your icon. This is deliberate, not a
fault to report.

In an activity the marker **is** the task: it is a drop target, or an
answer to be found. An icon that names what a pin is would answer the
question the activity is asking, and a decorative one competes with it.
Icons are for free exploration, where a learner is choosing what to
look at rather than being asked to find something.