There's tilesets, but honestly I think they detract. My extended ASCII are like 8x12 pixels and scan really easily. Even at 32x32 I can't reliably tell the difference between a dog a cat or a rat in most tilesets, especially on first glance, so a lot of memorization is still required with tiles, they allow for less information to be displayed at once, and they are more complicated to recognize.
Are there any hacks out there that make the UI less memorization-focused? I know there are graphics hacks, but I was never able to get them to work...