Some upgrades change what software does; others change how it feels to sit in front of all day. Odoo 20 does both, and its interface changes belong firmly in the second camp. There is no new layout to learn and no navigation model to retrain your team on. Instead, Odoo swapped the entire icon library — Font Awesome out, Google's Material Symbols in — cleaned up how icons are presented, softened the colours used for tags and statuses, and then worked through a long list of small refinements: redesigned dialogs and labels, a simpler rich-text editor, calmer website-builder overlays, and a handful of navigation touches you will use every day. This article covers what changed, based on the official Odoo 20 release notes.
The headline: Material Symbols replace Font Awesome
The release notes state it in a single line under General: Font Awesome icons have been replaced by Material Symbols icons. That one line touches every screen in the system, because icons are the interface's second language — the glyph on the button, the marker beside the menu, the symbol on the Kanban card. Every one of those now comes from Material Symbols, the icon family Google maintains for its own products, instead of the Font Awesome set Odoo had used for years.
For everyday users, the practical effect is a refresh rather than a re-education. The icons sit in the same places and mean the same things; they are drawn in a different hand. Material Symbols uses rounded, consistent strokes designed to stay legible at small sizes, which suits an ERP interface where icons are usually seen at sixteen pixels, not sixty.
For anyone with customisations, the swap deserves a line in the upgrade test plan. A custom module, theme, or view that referenced Font Awesome — by class name, or by expecting that icon font to be loaded — is now pointing at something that no longer exists in the core interface. Standard Odoo and Studio-built screens use the platform's own icon handling and move with the platform; hand-written references to the old set are the ones to grep for and check before go-live.
Cleaner icons and softer colours
The icon swap arrives with a visual restyle around it. In Odoo 20, icons are presented more cleanly, on white backgrounds, and the colours used for tags and status indicators are softer. Tags and statuses are the small coloured pills scattered across list views, Kanban cards, and forms — the “New”, “In Progress”, “Done” markers and category labels that users scan constantly. Saturated colours compete for attention everywhere at once; softer tones let a whole board be read at a glance while still distinguishing one state from another, and they reserve strong colour for the things that genuinely need it, like warnings.
This is the kind of change that is hard to screenshot and easy to feel. Nothing about the information on screen has changed — the same tags, the same statuses, the same records. It is simply less visual noise to filter out across a full working day, and for staff who live in list views and Kanban boards, that accumulates.
Dialogs, labels, and editors got a pass too
Several specific surfaces were redesigned or cleaned up in the same spirit:
- Dialog design. The design of dialogs — the pop-ups where confirmations, wizards, and quick edits happen — has been improved, so the most interruption-prone element of the interface is also one of the tidiest.
- Label design. Product, manufacturing, and packaging labels have been redesigned. Labels are printed artefacts rather than screens, but they are part of the product's look the moment they reach a shelf or a shipping bench.
- Rich-text editor. The media editor toolbar in the rich-text editor has been simplified — fewer controls competing in the toolbar when you are formatting text or handling media in emails, product descriptions, and website pages.
- Email template preview. The preview interface has been improved and now allows navigation between records, so you can check how a template renders across several real records without closing and reopening it.
The Website editor received the same treatment: its UI and UX were improved overall, the dropzones and overlays shown while dragging blocks were updated to be more modern and discreet, and the sidebar now automatically folds secondary option groups so the panel focuses on your current selection. People who build pages in Odoo spend their day inside those overlays; making them quieter is a real quality-of-life change.
Beyond the visual layer, the General section of the release notes lists interaction refinements that pair naturally with the new look:
- Link to current search. Share a link to the current view that preserves the applied searches, filters, and grouping — sending a colleague the exact list you are looking at, not instructions for rebuilding it.
- Relative date ranges, explained. When a custom filter uses a relative range such as “Last 30 days,” a tooltip shows the actual start and end dates; with a preconfigured filter, arrows in the search bar step backward or forward one period.
- Expand and collapse groups. In list view, ALT + click quickly expands or collapses all groups of the same level.
- Multi-record drag and drop. Multiple records can be dragged at once in list and Kanban views to reorder them or move them to another group or stage.
- Favourited searches keep their columns. A favourited search in a list view now retains the visible columns you had set, so a saved view looks the way you saved it.
- Archive instead of a dead end. If a record cannot be deleted, the option to archive it is offered instead.
- Decimal separator freedom. When typing decimal numbers, either a dot or a comma works as the separator, regardless of the localisation in the user's profile — a small mercy for teams whose keyboards and habits span countries.
Touch users were not forgotten either: bottom sheets — panels that slide up from the bottom of the screen — are now enabled for tablets in touch mode, matching the redesigned mobile experience.
The chatter — the message thread attached to nearly every record — got interface attention as well. You can now filter it to focus on conversations or on tracked changes, pin important messages so they stay visible instead of scrolling away under routine updates, and see who was added in CC on emails logged there. On a busy record, where the chatter mixes real discussion with dozens of automatic field-change notices, the filter alone makes the thread readable again.
What to check when you upgrade
Because this release's interface work is a refinishing rather than a rebuild, the upgrade checklist is short:
- Audit custom code for Font Awesome references. Search custom modules, themes, and QWeb templates for the old icon classes and any assumption that the Font Awesome font is loaded; replace them with the platform's current icon approach and re-test the screens.
- Check third-party modules. Apps that shipped their own Font Awesome-based icons may render with missing or mismatched glyphs until their authors update them — verify your critical add-ons on a test database.
- Walk the printed artefacts. Print a product label, a manufacturing label, and a packaging label from the test system and confirm the redesigned layouts still fit your label stock.
- Brief the team briefly. Users do not need training — the workflows are unchanged — but a two-minute heads-up that icons and tag colours will look different on Monday morning prevents a week of “did something break?” tickets.
Odoo 20's interface changes will not sell an upgrade on their own, and they are not meant to. Their job is to make the substantial changes elsewhere in the release — AI agents, the accounting overhaul, offline mode — land in an interface that feels current rather than dated. A new icon library, softer colours, and a sheaf of small refinements is exactly what that takes.
Further reading
- Odoo 20 Release Notes — Odoo — the General section: Material Symbols, dialog and label design, editor and navigation refinements.
- Odoo 20.0 Documentation — Odoo
