File type icon colours

Question

We're currently designing a new "Document Management" feature for our application, and I've come to the part where I need icons for the file types. I've gone down the route of doing something custom, but the question has come up "Do we need them to have colours or should we go with plain (likely grey) instead?"

These are the icons I've got so far. The logic I've gone with, is that users have become accustomed to the icons of the applications they use, and therefore the colours of these icons roughly reflects the icons of those associated applicattions.

For comparison, here's the grey variation

Is this something that is important, or does it not really make any difference? I'm looking specifically at a document listing, so there may be hundreds of lines in a table so the icon may/may not be the fastest way for a user to determine what type of file it is.

Answer 1

If you look at the file systems on Windows or Mac, you'll see icons in full color that match the programs responsible for opening those files.

Companies invest a lot of effort into helping users recognize their brand, a large component of which is often a carefully chosen color scheme.

By using those colors¹, you can leverage the effort that these companies have already put into teaching users to recognize these specific file types. This decreases processing time, because the user can leverage previous experiences. Specifically, the colors communicate additional data that facilitates this recognition.

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^{1: You might consider consulting your company's legal department in regards to creating a custom set of icons that are strongly influenced by another company's set of logos. I'm sure there are some strings attached to the selection of colors and graphical representation of their proprietary document formats. It looks like you've selected similar colors, but not exact. I'm not saying that's wrong, I'd just recommend making sure you're not putting yourself into a legally compromising situation.}