Agreed. The icons are poorly designed and applied, detracting from the user interface, rather than enhancing it.

Yes, please! I would love to turn these off on a per field basis.

Yes! I agree that they are detracting from the UI readability. I don’t care
about turning them off selectively, I’d like them all to disappear!

I concur, this would be a very useful feature and add value to the tool.

Just want to keep this active. Please let us toggle off the icons in the field type headers.

i was about to make a new topic, but i see it has already pointed out.
Since airtable is about data, and how to read them properly, in the current layout, is Distracting
one solution would be

1. to swap it, (First Description and afterwards the icon)
2. to have the ability to hide it
3. or appear what kind of field it is, when you mouse over it.

This is definitely a hot spot item. I only need to know what type of field it is - when I design it! After that - moot point and distraction.
It would also be nice to have a smaller column title font! If the title is COST OF GOODS - and my data is $13.50 - you get wasted space and huge columns. That means that if you have a large grid for no good reason.
I hate to compare to other products - but Alpha lets you do this customization with ease.

OMG - I JUST saw that no one has addressed this topic for 2 YEARS! So is it resolved and this question removed from the forum ???

Any resolution? I noticed that there are no field type icons in the templates that are ‘advertised’.

No resolution. When you actually apply a template, the icons return. No way to remove. I hate that my field, “boat name” appears as “A boat name”.

Especially A from single text is so distracting.
There should be on option to hide it

Airtable support is reminding me of Evernote support. Which isn’t good. There are things at Evernote that hundreds of customers want, with no opposition, that have been asked for for years and years, and yet never get implemented, or even acknowledged.

I see that this request–the ability to hide field type icons–is now four years old. I can see no reason whatsoever that this great idea is not implemented. There is no opposition. Obviously a dev is in love with the prettiness of his or her brilliant idea, and it’s not going to be taken away.

Others here have rightly said that the icons are distracting. And in my case, it’s just making the field widths too wide for my single character fields. Like Y/N, a number from 1 to 10, etc. I want these fields as narrow as possible, but when I reduce their width the titles go away and I’m left with only the stupid icon showing. And of course I just can’t even get the width narrow enough anyway, titles aside. I’ve got a base that has a few dozen of these fields and it’s so spread out in width that it’s a pain in the butt to use. Makes me consider moving it over to Google Sheets.

I’ve noticed this type of lack of awareness by Airtable support on other issues. It’s absurd. I guess Airtable is going to suffer the same outcome as Evernote eventually. A has been company, watching others improve their products.

Agreed on the support. Seems to be a common theme among these SaaS startups like ShipStation.

Any news here? or at least some answer about the roadmap.?

Bumping again - super annoying as they are mostly irrelevant to the data in cells.

Better options would be:

1. Hide icon entirely
2. Change icon position to left of description (mentioned above)
3. Choose custom icon

:)))) pllzzzz fix

I prefer them the way they are, not knowing field types can really slow down workflows, particularly when people can’t understand why they can’t add data for formula or lookup fields.
Having options to tweak every little thing makes for a confusing ui - even the very small amount of configuration options available now confuses some of my users.

I, too, find these icons very annoying.    Why does the Airtable support team refuse to fix this problem?   Is there a reason?  If so, why doesn't anyone tell us what it is?   

As an excited new Airtable user, I am super disappointed to come across this problem in Airtable and to now come to this thread to find out that it has been totally ignored by Airtable for 6 years!

I guess Airtable is not as cool as I initially thought.  Too bad.  Probably have to move on to something else.  😞

As a new Airtable user this is something that immediately stood out to me. It's absurd because they could easily have the icon appear when you hover over the header cell instead. Or not. Either way, have the option there and allow the user to remove the field type icon if they want to. It is such a basic idea with screen space being the most valued commodity on a spreadsheet, we shouldn't have to put up with this. Shame