So I'm very new to dwarf fortress having started to play this week, before even seeing the store page for it, so I feel like I can act like a good "new player" sounding board in this thread.
So... I had a try at ramps myself.
To start with, when I saw the steam page yesterday for the first time the ramps were the most jarring part of the screens that was immediately confusing to me. I looked through the entire thread to see if anyone had brought this up but meph you, on your first try, already got what I would say is the easiest way to make this much more easily read than just playing with shadows - directional texture. Just taking the regular texture and twisting it about 45 degrees immediately seems to solve the corner issue in the picture but unfortunately it looked like further down the pages people started to ignore this bit. If I were brand new, which I basically am, I can immediately see that the ramps here are a different tile from the grass around it and at that point its a simple scroll of the look cursor over to see its a ramp and bam! I now know that those tilted textures are ramps. Basically serves the same purpose as the arrows while looking a bit nicer.
This is another very good, immediately readable option compared to the first screw pump you posted earlier meph. The first one looked more like some kind of spike trap or shredder or something and if I didn't know what a real screw pump was I could be pretty lost as to what that means.
Now, at risk of showing exactly how new I really am, the last steam page screenshot shows some underground hallways covered in white soil looking tiles - is that snow or some other tile I haven't seen before?
Since the different sized sprites are being shown off it made me thing, what about the smallest things like earthworms, leeches, and spiders? What about their giant versions?