We’ve been talking internally about getting closer to parity of features between tags and categories, and to let tags be decorated with colors in the same way as categories, and to let both be decorated with icons.
Differentiating tags and categories with colors and icons can make a big difference in helping distinguish them and not “making people think” as they navigate through the discussions in their community.
So yes, I am in favor of making this happen across the board in core discourse. But I am not in favor of creating a chaotic colorful experience or making the sidebar functionality harder to use with icons. I do like @pmusaraj’s screenshot example of category style set to box - this could work quite well in the sidebar.
The Discourse for Teams sidebar handled the category decoration a little better than the new sidebar, I think. You could use the category style admin setting to choose bar, box, bullet or none, and the categories in the sidebar were displayed with the style chosen and all of them looked very nice! See screenshots.
