Yeah, lets focus on sprites. 
We had a few ideas we discussed, that aren't coded yet. I'm curious what you make of it:
1. Different floors/furniture for workshops based on material used; or transparent workshop ground so that you can see the constructed floor underneath. Examples show stone/stone, wood/stone, stone/wood, wood/wood. Pros are that it's more realistic and offer more variety and customization option by the player; cons are that it might look chaotic and less readable. (Hence why stone floors are dark and stone furniture is bright, to keep the contrast high. The wood example shows what happens if both have the same hue and brightness.)
2. Different sets of furniture and items for different materials. Again, more customization, but harder to build uniform forts. Sprite count spirals out of control fast considerin the amount of items to be made. I think glass had around 60-ish objects that can be made.
3. Items in containers. The biggest culprits of monotone copy+paste areas in the game are stockpiles. All the fancy new object sprites, all hidden inside the one bin or barrel sprite. What if we leave the bin open, showing one or a few of the items inside?
4. Item variations. Just like grasses and rock floors come in 1-4 options, the sprites for objects could have a small variety to them.
1. I think let the furniture source its color from the material's raws, but there's no need for a special floor. It doesn't make sense that dwarves would want to do that, in the first place, and it also doesn't make sense that you can make a whole workshop AND nine tiles worth of floor for one stone, when normally it's nine stone to make nine floor tiles. Furthermore, it only limits the variety of appearance, prevents come customization, and requires many exceptions for magma furnaces &c which don't necessarily have floor everywhere.
2. I don't think different materials need their own sprites except very rarely where the sprite clearly wouldn't work for one potential material. Although there are exceptions, just inheriting the color correctly should be enough in most cases, and it wouldn't necessarily make sense for the item to be different in other ways. Although your examples do look nice. But I don't think it's worth exploding the sprite count.
3. I think this one depends entirely on the performance impact. If it's not a big deal for performance, might as well do this. Otherwise, bins can hold a bunch of items anyway, and you won't be able to see them all (hardly anything is worth making a sprite for "loads of this one item" in practice), so might as well let stockpiles look a bit tidier. In fact, I reckon there's plenty of people who want their stockpiles tidy anyway. Also, the example is confusing. I can only guess maybe it's piles of super giant coins? If so, maybe reconsider and make coins a glittery pile instead. There's a limit to how much the scale can be disregarded, and they look like a bunch of baozi/steamed buns. Or the plate piles like you see at a buffet, maybe.
4. Seems like too much work for too little benefit. There are loads of different types of items in the game anyway, and loads of different colors. This isn't an area where artificial variety is needed. In fact, nowhere is really, as long as the variety that's already reflected in the game is realized, there won't be an issue of excessive homogeneity in practice. Again, your furniture examples look nice, but I'm sure there will be plenty of people who want to disable it anyway, so it seems like a considerably low priority.
Also: Stockpiles signs. (Last one is for custom stockpiles). I won't spoil the rest, the intent is to see if any are very unclear. 
I'm intentionally doing this without looking at anything anyone else has said about it. Tried to look at it as though I didn't already know the stockpile types, to varying success. From left to right:
1. Top looks like a fork, bottom like a nazi grenade. Or maybe a paint brush? Not really sure.
2. Cage, presumably animals. I can't say I'd recognize it without knowing what it was supposed to be.
3. Shield, presumably weapons.
4. Bars and blocks.
5. Cloth
6. Coins
7. Corpses, but if I was new to DF I might very well guess poison.
8. A ring. Finished goods?
9. A fan or mushroom and a perfume bottle or potion of some sort? Maybe a tear drop. I'm guessing the purple thing is meant to be a plump helmet, but I'm going on color for that, so based on that I guess food.
10. Furniture
11. Gems
12. Leather/hide
13. Not a fucking clue, from the image. I guess since there's no "powder" or "hill and cloud" stockpile and it kind of looks like a pile of some shit, must be refuse.
14. Paper/documents
15. Stone
16. Looks like ball bearings or cannon balls. Copper ones, on the bottom. So my best guess is siege equipment, but I wonder if a ballista wouldn't be more obvious for that.
17. Specified as custom. Looks like that star from the time Jesus was born, though, which seems like a weird choice to mean "non-specific stockpile" to me. Why not give it the jaggedy black lines that are universally recognized as "text but you can't read it from this vantage"? Bigger than on the paper, obviously.
I think it'll be easier to recognize in game though, since you'll only see them after designating, so you'll get used to it
And go with colored version, most people these days can afford the colored screen ink
Now, proceeding to the next page.
So it was arrows, and wood. The feathers on the arrows are pretty huge, but maybe it can't be helped given size constraints. The wood still doesn't look like wood to me, but I think it should be fine in context.
Speaking of casting shadows... (Just testing workshops without floor. Quick mock-up, you can still see a bit of rock floor I failed to remove XD)
As expected, the transparent looks great.
Although since we're talking about workshops, I'll mention a criticism I encountered which I agree with. The combination of top-down walls and not so top-down furniture is already a stress on people's perceptive abilities and there are a lot of potentials that something imperfect shatters the illusion that things make sense.* Specifically, the forge overlapping with the ostensibly taller wall to the north of it doesn't quite work. Not sure there's a good solution to this.
Speaking of casting shadows... (Just testing workshops without floor. Quick mock-up, you can still see a bit of rock floor I failed to remove XD)
I like this new border around the grassy floor better than the one from a few pages back:
I don't noticed the stone floor below the tables unless I zoom in. It just looks like it could be shadow.
They're representing totally different things, though. The stockpile borders are the main visual component of it, so they need to be a bit more noticeable, while the workshop borders are just to make it clear which area you can't build other stuff on top of.
*With regards to the game's geometry, I mean. With regards to life in general, that's a different story.
Author
Topic: Steam/Itch.io tileset - Mayday/Ironhand - Discussion and Suggestions (Read 462317 times)