[HN Gopher] If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like some...
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If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting
good at design
Author : lateforwork
Score : 749 points
Date : 2026-01-17 23:47 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mastodon.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (mastodon.social)
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| Not really. Last 3 are too busy for icons. They are like clipart.
| lateforwork wrote:
| The first 3 are just awful.
| cj wrote:
| I personally find uninspired boring icons way easier to
| visually scan than a collection of unique illustrated icons.
|
| But I agree they don't look pretty.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| It's utility vs soul.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| And we have plenty of utility everywhere in tech nowadays
| but very little soul.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| I honestly couldn't care less if my UI has soul. I just
| want it to work and get out of the way.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| I get what they're trying to say, but I don't think a 14yo with
| their first Mac is going to know what an inkwell represents. Let
| alone what an inkwell is.
| eviks wrote:
| What kind of knowledge does a 14you have to parse the two
| sticks in the first icon easier vs. remembering some school
| trivia?
| gumby271 wrote:
| I have no idea what app this is an icon for, but from the ones
| in the middle I have to assume it's Apple's version of Word?
| I'll agree that the inkwell one is dated and doesn't work well
| now, but how on earth is a pencil + line conveying anything
| useful?
| duskwuff wrote:
| > from the ones in the middle I have to assume it's Apple's
| version of Word?
|
| Correct. Word : Excel : Powerpoint :: Pages : Numbers :
| Keynote.
| gumby271 wrote:
| Ah thanks, Numbers is the only one I know since it
| sometimes still shows up instead of Excel.
| II2II wrote:
| Pages, which is a word processor. I could only figure that
| out from the 5th and 6th icons, which are breaking the
| cardinal rule about having text in the icon.
|
| Personally, I wouldn't be able to figure out what the first
| three icons are for without the context of the other icons.
| The first two icons are meaningless. The third icon vaugly
| represents a pen drawing a line, which would lead me to think
| it is a drawing program. The fourth program would allow me to
| identify it as word processor, and is my favourite. The rest
| are identifiable as well.
|
| Microsoft office isn't much better _but_ at least there were
| consistent elements between versions to make them easier to
| identify for experienced users who are upgrading. I couldn 't
| say the same for Apple's icons. LibreOffice's icons make it
| easier to identify each program, even if they aren't the
| prettiest.
| gumby271 wrote:
| Microsoft's icons (until their most recent Liquid Glass
| redesign) were probably the best attempt at abstract but
| still useful to a new user. The Excel icon looked like a
| grid, Word had lines, PowerPoint a pie chart. They're not
| perfect, but it's interesting to see the new ones that have
| just less detailed and are a little more blobby, or melted.
| danpalmer wrote:
| It looks like someone getting good at illustration. Older icons
| are far better illustrations. However icon design is not just
| about illustration, it's about clarity and affordances. Icons
| don't exist in isolation like an illustration, they exist
| alongside the rest of the UX and other app icons, and being
| recognisable is important.
|
| All that to say, the sweet pot was likely somewhere in the middle
| of this timeline. The earliest icons aren't recognisable enough
| as they're too illustrative. The later icons aren't recognisable
| enough because they're too basic. The middle are pretty, clear
| from colour, clear from shape, well branded.
| christophilus wrote:
| I agree. The middle one seems to be the best combination of
| clarity and simplicity.
| temporallobe wrote:
| I spent half a year designing and creating 200+ icons for a
| custom geospatial mapping app. I really enjoyed the work but it
| was grueling and tedious, especially the design part. Too many
| people had too many different opinions on which symbols meant
| what, which styles clearly conveyed ideas without being too
| detailed, and many other things that kept wasting my time and
| causing a lot of rework and inconsistencies. It was literally
| just me doing the work, so I stopped trying to get consensus
| and took a few weeks to redesign the entire set and even used
| color science to inform my design decisions. I created the
| entire set without external input, then presented it. Sure
| there was some tweaking here and there, but I believe it turned
| about to be great and no one really complained in the end. The
| most important part was that end-users were happy. I used
| Inkscape and developed a set of scripts to automate the build
| and had everything in a very organized Git repo.
| BTBurke wrote:
| I'd be interested in seeing those if you're open to sharing.
| temporallobe wrote:
| This was about 8 years ago and I am not sure I ever
| retained a local copy of the repo. If I find it, I'll
| resurrect it in a public Github repo unless there's some
| NDA/IP issue.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _no one really complained_
|
| They were happy that someone finally made a decision, and
| freed them from the burden of fruitless repeated
| deliberation.
| bigiain wrote:
| Yep. Sometimes it's better to keep everybody away from the
| bikeshed until it's fully finished and painted.
| heisenbit wrote:
| Consistency sells but is really hard to ensure in time
| bounded series of narrow discussions with changing
| participants. But this must not discount the value of the
| preceding often frustrating search for understanding the
| requirements and prototyping. Throwing away the prototype
| while all the lessons are still in the head can yield great
| design.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| In feedback solicitation situations with multiple
| stakeholders, it's important to attach cost to
| suggestions. Consulted without being responsible is
| always a dangerous offering.
|
| Not in the sense of "This is how long that will take me"
| (because who cares about someone else's time?), but in
| "Of the 3 things you requested, which 1 is your must-
| have?"
|
| Often this is approximated via design/dev team pushback,
| but it's easier just to be explicit about it: i.e.
| everyone gets X change request tokens.
| judahmeek wrote:
| Resolving bikeshedding might be LLM's most valuable
| contribution to an organization
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That's just like hiring McKinsey et al - the true value
| isn't the advice itself, it's probably been written down
| by some poor intern working 80 hours a week yet billed to
| the client as "director" time, the true value of why
| these consultants still get hired despite their truly
| abysmal track record is that management can use that
| "external advice" to cut through red tape and plow over
| internal resistance.
|
| LLMs however... they give part of this power to lower
| levels as well. After all, what is an LLM other than the
| condensed knowledge of humanity? (Partially /s)
| card_zero wrote:
| Possibly the half year of annoyance helped inform the weeks
| of opinionated inspiration.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| can you share the icons? curious to see the finished product
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| This is one of the many reasons I do my own projects. I do
| value the opinion of people without knowledge and experience,
| but I don't want to feel obligated to make them feel I did
| what they wanted.
| amelius wrote:
| Question: what do you think is a great example of an icon for
| people/users? I'm asking because to my taste nobody seems to
| get it right.
| temporallobe wrote:
| I am partial to the relevant icons in FontAwesome and these
| days the Bootstrap icons. I think the silhouette of a
| generic, androgynous portrait universally gets the idea
| across nicely.
| qznc wrote:
| Do you think it would have worked out if you skipped the
| grueling and tedious discussions entirely?
| temporallobe wrote:
| I definitely needed the initial input from the stakeholders
| as to what they wanted and why, but it turned into
| pointless bickering about colors and many disagreements
| about symbol meanings - for example should a dropped pin
| have a shadow? Should it be pin or a baloon-like thingy?
| Should it lean left or right? How does one represent a
| "duty station" when there is no previous iconography or
| other kind of standard around this? It also led to a lot of
| design-by-committee meetings where well-intentioned people
| suggested good ideas but things were always left at some
| ambiguous action item that never had any follow through.
| This took months and I kept re-rendering the icon set
| (which were all multi-layer SVGs) and then pasting the PNG
| renderings into a Word doc because that's how they wanted
| to review them.
|
| What this did teach me was to create very efficient
| workflows. I had all the Inkscape keystrokes memorized and
| found out they had an API that allowed me to create some
| level of automation (things like batch conversations IIRC).
| I kept certain symbols as separate base/template images so
| I could quickly swap things in and out. I had separate
| color files with swatches of various color themes, all in
| hexadecimal. Since I was and am fundamentally a software
| engineer, I used those engineering processes and principles
| to make it more like a typical software project than just a
| collection of images.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Funnily enough that's (stereotypically at least) the Apple
| way of product design.
| xattt wrote:
| Queue adenoidal voice:
|
| Apple has the benefit of massive cash-flow and, as a result,
| hiring _many_ competent designers who draw and create to a
| specification. The specification could be created by another
| team of senior designers that are paid handsomely to deal
| with the gruelling task of defining a corporate identity.
|
| This is similar to how major feature cartoons, which
| typically require variations of an image to be drawn over and
| over again, are typically animated by more than one person.
|
| I.e. Apple has the money. They can do better than having one
| extremely hand-cramped illustrator crank out silhouette-style
| icons.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > Apple has the money. they can do better
|
| But they haven't. The latest Mac OS is atrocious. Glass?
| Are they literally trying to mimic 2006's Compiz?
| Gigachad wrote:
| None of the Pages icons are recognisable because almost no one
| uses Pages. The word icon is just a blue W which is not any
| more illustrative than an orange pen.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Document, pen, orange, and name "Pages" is pretty excellent
| all round for recognisability in my opinion.
|
| Over the years Word/Powerpoint/Excel have done similar
| things, they have their own colour, their own name/letter,
| and usually have had a descriptive graphic in the icon too,
| indicating a document, grid, or slide.
| shagie wrote:
| One of my favorite series is Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper...
| in In Ashes Born, there's an bit about creating a logo for
| the company... He pointed to the far end of
| his studio. Two tiny patches of white--which were probably
| actually gray--lay in a single pool of light. One was a
| smudge of red and the other was a spiral of red. "Which one
| of those is your logo?" he asked. "Neither," Pip
| said. "The smudge," I said understanding where the
| kid was taking us. "Right," he said. "The smudge."
| "What?" Pip asked. The kid held up the paper from the
| workbench. "Look, this is nice and all, but it's too fussy.
| If you look at anybody else's logo, it's not fussy. It's
| iconic. A crown with wings. A C in a circle. That's yours,"
| he said to Pip. "All of them are simple shapes combined to
| form an unmistakable pattern."
|
| My own choice for a gavatar is similar -
| https://github.com/shagie (it's from a photo I took). While
| by itself its a neat bit, its also something that is easily
| recognizable as "that's Shagie's" when its projected on a
| screen on the other side of the room or if it's someone's
| full screen share and everyone's icons are shrunk down to
| smaller blurs - mine remains clearly distinct.
|
| The goal of an icon is to be able to identify it quickly
| without having to read the associated text.
|
| The inkwell and the two with the paper are artistic - but
| they aren't things that stand out quickly when you're trying
| to find them in the launchpad or on the sidebar.
|
| Pages is orange. Numbers is green. iTunes is red. Keynote is
| blue.
|
| For Microsoft, Word is blue, Excel is green, and Powerpoint
| is orange (and Outlook has an envelope like shape). The
| letter reinforces the choice, but that's more of a hint and
| reinforcement.
|
| The shape and color is the important thing for quickly
| finding what you're looking for.
| WWLink wrote:
| The office icons are rather subtle but do sorta illustrate
| what they do if you look carefully - the word icon is a list,
| the excel icon is a spreadsheet, and the powerpoint icon is a
| pie chart.
|
| That you have to look closely is kinda crap lol. Whoever
| designed the icons was more obsessed with consistent branding
| instead of making icons that make sense.
|
| Looking at the start menu, some MS icons are great. Paint,
| Notepad, Calculator are all fantastic.
| immibis wrote:
| Office doesn't exist any more. Product suite was renamed to
| Copilot 365.
| inejge wrote:
| Just like Twitter is now X, full stop? With the
| difference that the "Office" brand is much older and has
| much more staying power. Besides, the desktop application
| suite is still named the same AFAIK.
| sparqlittlestar wrote:
| I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but it's the Office
| mobile _app_ that was renamed to Copilot 365. They haven
| 't yet thrown away the entire Office brand
| immibis wrote:
| The word Office no longer appears on office.com.
| jan_Sate wrote:
| Anyone else doesn't like modern minimalist icon design? It
| looks boring.
| rk06 wrote:
| icons should prioritize usability first,and design,
| intersting afterwards.
|
| if your users need billboards, then your job is to make great
| bill boards
| WWLink wrote:
| The current icons really aren't that good. Looking at apple
| specifically: The facetime and messages icons are almost
| completely indistinguishable. Get angry and say I'm blind,
| but so is a lot of the userbase - like legitimately,
| legally blind people.
|
| The camera icon on iOS is just a fucking camera lens with a
| grey background. No context.
|
| The calculator one is actually pretty good.
|
| The photos one is also bullshit lol.
| what wrote:
| FaceTime is a video camera, messages is a speech bubble.
| They look nothing alike except they share the same
| colors?
| dijit wrote:
| they share so much visual language that I always do a
| double-take when I am about to click on MacOS.
|
| You're right that in isolation they are visually
| distinguished, but our eyes don't see colour uniformly,
| and these icons do not exist in isolation.
|
| I guess frosted white on green is not a good combination
| for quickly discerning shape.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Sure, but it's not clear they're unrelated. Maybe
| interesting is necessary (but not sufficient) for
| usability?
|
| Also, the newer icons don't really indicate a word
| processing application. If anything, they're look like they
| might be for a drawing program. So regardless of
| interesting/abstract/whatever, it seems like a poor icon
| choice.
| fvgvkujdfbllo wrote:
| Boring and same. Harder to use. It is for people who organize
| their books by the color of covers.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I still love the KDE Oxygen icon theme.
| pembrook wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Anyone who thinks an intricate illustration of a quill and ink
| communicates to the user "Hey this app is our Microsoft
| Word"...is not thinking about what function an icon is supposed
| to serve.
|
| It's like comparing a road sign to an 18th century painting and
| saying "LOOK HOW FAR WE'VE FALLEN!"
|
| These are not serious people.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| The quill and ink at least communicates that it's about
| writing. The new one is so abstract that when I first looked
| at it I had no idea what I was even looking at, it certainly
| doesn't communicate "this is like word" to me. Without
| comparison to the previous icon, how many people do you think
| would understand that the bottom line is intended to be a
| stroke drawn by the pen?
| pembrook wrote:
| I think you might be post-hoc rationalizing an emotional
| feeling, as clearly this meme is emotionally triggering to
| everyones nostalgia/pessimism nerve (hence why it went
| viral).
|
| I'm 100% positive more people would guess the far left icon
| is a text editor compared to the far right icon. Not that I
| like the left icon aesthetically. Both are pretty weak
| icons.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Leftmost is probably a pen, rightmost is definitely a pen
| and specifically a fountain pen. I've never seen these
| icons before, and I'm trying to be the fairest I can, and
| I think rightmost wins at evoking "text editor". But the
| one exactly in the center wins by a mile. Pen on lined
| paper, hard to do better.
| spookie wrote:
| Same thought. The one on the left just conveys "notes" to
| me. Middle actually seems to be about a more "well put
| together" document. A fountain pen by itself doesn't
| necessarily mean documents to me, but signing them.
|
| As you, never seen these icons in my entire life.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Pages is a word processor. Not a text editor.
|
| The far left icon's color gradient and Apple Pencil shape
| made me think it was for drawing.
| mlyle wrote:
| It's a page layout / word processing program. I see the
| icon and I think "maybe text editor, maybe drawing
| program".
|
| #4 or #5 are best at conveying what it is for and for
| being distinct from other icons.
| dpark wrote:
| Neither extreme looks like a real word processor. The
| left looks like maybe an icon for notes. The right looks
| like it's for a drawing program.
| fatherwavelet wrote:
| I agree but I haven't used Apple or iphone since the Apple
| IIe as a kid.
|
| I am sure people have all kinds of associations and emotional
| involvement with these icons.
|
| With having no idea what these icons even do, to me it just
| looks like meaningless complexity.
| fvgvkujdfbllo wrote:
| I prefer illustrations and old school icons. Every icon was
| unique and easily recognizable.
|
| Now all icons look alike, and it takes longer to recognize.
| kyleee wrote:
| I am basically icon blind thanks to a couple decades of icon
| churn
| danpalmer wrote:
| I think this spectrum shows the issues with that though. Take
| the last one, the pen pot. You truly have to _learn_ what
| that means. Pen pots aren't a thing that most people are
| familiar with (I've never used one, I don't think my parents
| generation did mostly either), and there's little explanation
| of what it is.
|
| Move up just one previous, and you've got a good looking
| illustration still, the pen and paper, but now a) everyone
| knows what a pen and paper look like, b) it literally says
| the name of the app, and c) the yellow colour scheme
| distinguishes it well when scanning many icons. It's clearly
| more accessible to new users, existing users, young and old
| users, and in terms of illustration quality, seems pretty
| subjective as to whether it's better or worse than the last
| one.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Pen pots aren 't a thing that most people are familiar
| with_
|
| Personally, no. Cognitively? We've been seeing quills and
| ink in children's stories for centuries. One doesn't have
| to have used a bubble level to get the analogy in the iOS
| Level app.
|
| > _pen and paper, but now a) everyone knows what a pen and
| paper look like_
|
| A quill and ink are conventionally portrayed in relation to
| writing. A pen and paper could refer to _e.g._ sketching.
|
| I'm obviously nitpicking. But I reject the notion that we
| have to oversimplify to the degree you're suggesting.
|
| > _it literally says the name of the app_
|
| The OS does this almost everywhere apps exist. Putting the
| name in the logo is superfluous.
| barrell wrote:
| I'm not convinced the pen pot needs any more learning than
| anything else. Even the ones with the paper - is it a word
| processor, emailing tool, something about newsletters?
| Maybe a PDF or markup tool? Or a layout tool for print
| media? Or just a signature tool?
|
| At some point, the user has to find out, in the same manner
| they find out about the pen pot.
|
| I think users could easily associate the "pen and poison
| potion" with word processing for years until someone says
| "click on the pen and ink" and then they have a lightbulb
| moment.
|
| I think we went from icons being "visually distinct" to
| "visually descriptive" to "visually uniform". Personally I
| prefer the visually distinct. I'm not convinced we gained
| some massive leap forward in usability moving away from it;
| I know I struggle substantially more to find an app or tab
| that I'm looking for nowadays than when I first got a Mac.
| concinds wrote:
| I think that _is_ the flawed conscious reason for these
| icons getting excessively oversimplified and minimalistic.
| And why the Save floppies were replaced with inconsistent
| crap. And some higher-up at Apple 's severe untreated OCD
| is the reason for the excessive uniformity (squircle jail,
| one saturated dominant color, the geometric "grid system"
| they keep bragging about at keynotes). Look at old
| Launchpad screenshots from OS X Lion and you'll see what
| drove _that guy_ nuts and made him ruin every icon.
|
| I showed this timeline to non-technical people around me
| and they prefer... the original pen pot.
| mchaver wrote:
| Having distinct icons is nice. People can learn. It's
| cool to have cultural relics live on in some way. My kids
| recognize the floppy disk as save, but they have probably
| never seen one in real life.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _a) everyone knows what a pen and paper look like, b) it
| literally says the name of the app_
|
| c) Pages plays for the Dodgers
|
| aaahhh! i get it, it's a sports autographs app!
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| As someone who still misses the skeuomorphic design of
| things like "Books", the first icon is dramatically more
| expressive than any of the others.
|
| These days I do a search for an app by learning its colour,
| and using that to narrow down the options. There's much
| less visual associativity of "this icon" === "this app". I
| really oughtn't have to execute a hash-table search just to
| find the damn app I want.
| LtWorf wrote:
| The new one is just some lines over a background, and
| you'll have to pick it in a sea of other icons that are
| similarly 2-3 lines over the same background.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I think this spectrum shows the issues with that though.
| Take the last one, the pen pot. You truly have to _learn_
| what that means._
|
| Not an issue. You learn it once, and then you instantly
| recognize Pages every time, due to its distinctiveness from
| all other app icons (and the same holds for each of the
| others).
|
| You will be looking to click the Pages app among other apps
| (in a launcher, Applictions/ folder view, alt-tab app row),
| etc, for many years. You'll only need to make the
| discovery/association once.
| mchaver wrote:
| I think images and representations of no longer used
| artifacts still live on in our cultural knowledge. They
| don't necessarily have to be a part of everyday lives.
| Think of children's stories and fairy tales. I don't see
| swords and shields in every day life very often but I can
| recognize them easily. I've never seen a komodo dragon in
| person but could recognize one if walked down my street.
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| I'm not a Mac user, but ever since Google changed their icons
| a couple years back I still struggle to tell apart
| Maps/Photos/Drive etc at a glance.
| WWLink wrote:
| I agree with your conclusion that the sweet spot is in the
| middle, because I could easily explain to my mom "click the
| icon that has a pen and paper" and it would be very obvious.
| The current icon is completely ambiguous crap.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| How in the world are the newer icons more clear?
|
| They are hard to distinguish from each other, removing the main
| goal of an icon...to make it easy and quick to uniquely
| identify an app.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| I use macOS and have done so for several years. But I had to
| look up this app icon to know what app it was. It's the Pages
| app, which I don't use and don't keep in my dock. Looking at
| only the leftmost icon, I was thinking it might be the Notes
| app or the Freeform app, both of which might conceivably also
| be represented by what to me looks like an Apple Pencil for
| iPad.
|
| Looking at the reminder of the icons, I recognize that it's
| not the Notes app because although I no longer use that one I
| have in the past so I remember that it has looked like a
| notepad with some lines and some yellow on it. But the
| leftmost one might as well have been a newer version of Notes
| than the one I last used.
| kcrwfrd_ wrote:
| Tbh I like the far left way more than the rest. It is simple,
| clear, and distinctive.
|
| Dead middle is decent too.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Is it clear though? It looks like an icon for a drawing app,
| not a word processor.
| dd8601fn wrote:
| I actually had to try to zoom in on the older, "ideal" example
| shown, just to see what it is.
|
| Yes, my eyes aren't great anymore. Yes, I'm on my phone looking
| at a social media post. But I feel like the speed and clarity
| of the newer ones was (accidentally) on display here.
| trueismywork wrote:
| Latest icons are also horrible. Magnifying glass for "open
| containing directory".
| ben_w wrote:
| The new one, orange pen on black background, to me looks like a
| blacksmith hammer or a welding torch.
|
| I would not associate it with writing at all.
|
| 2, 3, and 4 (from the left) look like they're for a notes app
| rather than DTP.
|
| 5 and 6 tell me what the app is for.
|
| 7 looks like an art app, not writing. I favour skeumorphism,
| but to work that needs to use metaphors people are familiar
| with, and pots of ink are something I know only from art
| stores.
| seviu wrote:
| The fact that since Tahoe everything is a squircle kills me. I
| can't visually find my apps anymore.
|
| It takes me several seconds to find an existing opened app when
| I hit cmd tab, it has been months already, I use my Mac for
| work, I know this stuff.
|
| It's not just the new design but also something else, like if
| part of my Mac lost its soul.
| ljm wrote:
| Older versions of MacOS had an elegance to them. It's lost
| some of that over the years.
|
| The overall trend towards minimalism has ironed out much of
| what made it unique and it hasn't always succeeded in
| improving UX. Even Liquid Glass and the ability to tint the
| icons (to make them even more indistinguishable) depends on
| the detail being kept to a minimum.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Yeah, what's amazing to me is that they play with the icon so
| much in an environment where they expect people to find the
| application by its icon. I always set up my machines so that
| I use a launcher that allows me to type the name of the
| program and then press Enter because I hate searching through
| grids of icons to find things, especially when the icons
| change over time. But when the company itself is expecting
| people to find things visually and then constantly changes
| the visual landscape, it just seems egregious.
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| Designer here: there's a trade-off between visual harmony (all
| icons look the same) and ease of differentiation.
|
| A standardized container adds regularity to irregular shapes.
|
| Recently, Apple has been heavily opting for visual harmony, so
| their icons look consistent when seen as a set. Google too.
| It's an industry trend that is fairly annoying.
|
| Similar "let's remove the differentiation" decision made for
| menu icons in macOS: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
| everyone wrote:
| But is it simply trading actual concrete functionality and
| usability in exchange for the concept of "superficially looks
| nicer to certain people in a marketing image" ?
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| I'd argue it's trading legibility for aesthetics.
|
| My personal take is that aesthetics play an important
| function, but legibility is more important. Good design
| will achieve both.
| reactordev wrote:
| A great example of the pains it takes to achieve both:
|
| https://admindagency.com/road-sign-design/
|
| Road sign design had to achieve both and more and yet
| they still managed to pull it off.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Yep, quite literally form-over-function.
| curt15 wrote:
| >A standardized container adds regularity to irregular
| shapes.
|
| Does putting differently shaped icons in a standardized
| container make them harder to distinguish? When I look at an
| object its boundaries register first. If all icons are
| enclosed in the same square container, then they all look
| like squares at first glance.
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| Yes, it does for the reasons you outline
| internet2000 wrote:
| Non-designer here: The bounding container being consistent
| signalizes "this is an App," which is helpful in the broader
| context of an operating system. For example, if I saw this on
| my file browser, I'd have to think if it's an App or a
| document: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thum
| b/9/9e/Li...
|
| That first level of signalization builds on top of
| familiarity with iOS. The squircle signifying app shows up a
| lot, even in marketing materials for iPhones and iPads.
|
| Once you're past that first level, you can use the shape
| inside the container. The Phone and Messages icons are just
| green squircles, right? Yet they're very distinctive, because
| the interior shape (phone handset, bubble) is what registers.
| https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/17/71/51/32/240_F_1771513287_ATNuUv.
| ..
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| It used to be the other way round. Sheet of paper indicates
| document/file, arbitrary shapes for applications.
|
| I'd argue that differentiating apps from each other is more
| important than file types apart. Probably
| internet2000 wrote:
| Mac OS and iOS thumbnails documents/files for icons on
| the file browser and search, so shapes are irregular.
| E.g. Landscape thumb for a .pptx, square album art for an
| .mp3, portrait for a .pdf, arbitrary shape for a .xlsx.
| 3rd party apps can participate in that through Quicklook
| plugins.
|
| It's a great feature because I can scan several files
| named export (n).xlsx on my downloads folder stack, and
| know which one I want from the thumbnail alone. OS
| feature improvements change the design context.
| raincole wrote:
| > it's about clarity and affordances
|
| The ink pot one tells me it's clearly an Apple's app. Though I
| might not know what it is, I know it's likely Apple's.[0]
|
| The new ones can be a random app that shows up in AppStore when
| you search 'note taking' or 'todo list' or whatever.
|
| I'm also strongly against the idea that an icon needs to
| directly tell you the functionality of the app. Photoshop's
| icon is literally 'PS.' Twitter is (was) a bird. No one thinks
| they lack clarity.
|
| [0]: of course in this AI era if the retro detailed
| illustration comes back, everyone will just generate their
| icons in that style... it's a battle you can't win.
| nedt wrote:
| OS X had a lot of icons that were detailed illustrations but
| you'd only see it when you zoom in. Yet they also worked as
| small icons. You can have both and Apple did. The textedit icon
| is a great example.
| flqn wrote:
| Nitpick: icons are about signifiers, not affordances. A button
| affords being pressed, an icon on the button signifies what
| pressing it will do.
| arendtio wrote:
| I think it depends on size. If the icon is very small, I like
| the simple ones. If the icon is large, I like the detailed
| ones. Optimally, you can have an icon with more detailed
| versions when displayed larger, but it remains the same icon.
| kuon wrote:
| I'm sure design theory says the new ones are better, but the very
| first one was much clearer for users. Also on the phone I could
| say "click on the ink with the pen".
| gumby271 wrote:
| I like how the new icon forces you to do product placement for
| Apple devices just to explain it. Tap the icon with the Apple
| Pencil and rectangle. Just don't convey it using color, that's
| now completely unpredictable.
| tern wrote:
| There is no such "design theory," only schools of design
| adastra22 wrote:
| I wish this was better understood.
| crazygringo wrote:
| There are basic principles of design -- of balance, emphasis,
| color, weight, etc. -- that are very much part of a general
| "design theory". That aren't dependent on any particular
| school of thought.
| EGreg wrote:
| I remember growing up with Apple computers, even the black-and-
| white Macs were easier to understand than today's nonsense,
| with its "liquid glass" and hidden modes like scrollbars that
| suddenly appear.
|
| Kid Pix was for kids. Kids could understand it. Easily.
|
| Macs were easy to use and understand. What happened? Steve Jobs
| passed away, that's what happened... and everyone stepped up to
| "make their mark", first of all Jony Ive.
| Gigachad wrote:
| On the phone you can now say "Command + space, then search
| pages"
| dmd wrote:
| For a moment I thought you meant you could _say_ "command
| space" to Siri on iOS and was prepared to have my mind blown.
| internet2000 wrote:
| "Ink? Oh is that what's in the bottle?"
| robocat wrote:
| That icon is pretty terrible. Fountain pens were obsolete 50
| years ago and ink in bottles is even more outdated. What's with
| the shiny spherical bottle? It feels like a hipster icon design
| to me.
|
| Of course picking a meaningful icon is tres difficult.
|
| If we are given the name and then we learn the icon, then
| perhaps it doesn't matter too much what the icon is?
| sevensor wrote:
| > Fountain pens were obsolete 50 years ago and ink in bottles
| is even more outdated
|
| My friend, you have no idea what you're missing out on. Even
| cheap fountain pens can be very good these days, and we are
| living in a golden age of bottled inks.
| robocat wrote:
| > My friend, you have no idea what you're missing out on
|
| Being left handed has its advantages, however smearing wet
| ink over the page as you write doesn't endear one to nibbed
| pens.
|
| And leaked ink truely sucks (although I would guess modern
| technology is better at avoiding that).
|
| Is a fountain pen good for illustration? The very very
| small amount of writing I do these days is usually mixed
| words with images/symbols/lines.
|
| To me out in the colonies, fountain pen culture appears to
| be more about either signaling pretentiousness (what is
| Montblanc) or designer hipsterism.
|
| I wonder how many practical engineers use a fountain pen?
| sevensor wrote:
| > I wonder how many practical engineers use a fountain
| pen?
|
| Not a lot, but more than zero. I take copious meeting
| notes and I do a lot of my serious thinking on paper. I
| find fountain pens vastly more comfortable for writing
| multiple pages of text, compared to ballpoints.
|
| Left handed users do have to adjust their writing
| technique, and it's understandable that many do not find
| it worth the effort.
|
| I have never held a Montblanc. I believe they run to the
| hundreds if not thousands of dollars. An extremely niche
| form of wealth signaling. I'm not sure who they're even
| for? Fancy New York bankers maybe? Extremely devoted pen
| hobbyists? I'd be afraid to carry one around.
| strobe wrote:
| and still in 2026 is wide market of those pens with price
| ranges ~$2000-$3 and ink chooses where some bottles costs
| ~$50 for 30-60ml.
| taneq wrote:
| Icon design is actually really interesting because good icons are
| an attractor in a phase space defined by the expectations of the
| users of those icons. An icon doesn't need to look like the
| action it represents. It needs to _evoke the concept of the
| action_ when the user sees it. So in a perfect world the icon
| evolves towards the user's expectation while the user learns
| their expectation based on the icon.
| gumby271 wrote:
| For instance an icon with a pointy stick over top of a
| horizontal rectangle with a gradient applied conveys a tool for
| doing document and page layout. Got it.
| calf wrote:
| Is that what they learn at Symbolics Systems.
| II2II wrote:
| I would argue that only makes sense if there is some
| consistency in the icon through time. There were four major
| changes in representation in the icons, and the change in
| contrast/colour between the first and second icons is
| sufficient to suggest a fifth representation in my mind.
| jxdxbx wrote:
| Icons should not be a uniform shape.
| gumby271 wrote:
| Man I fucking hate this trend in icon design where they've both
| become so insanely basic and also tried to be "consistent" with
| all the icons to the point of being useless. Google started this
| a while back with their app icons on Android, where they all have
| some basic shape and the Google colors and it still sucks trying
| to find the right one. The horrendous icon theming users are able
| to do only makes it worse, reducing them to two-color versions.
|
| Microsoft did this okay until their recent liquid glass redesign,
| which just went further into colored blob territory.
|
| The worst are the icons that rely on the user using a previous
| version of the app to understand the very abstract version of the
| icon used today. See:
| https://mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/115072885331562510
| Gigachad wrote:
| Google was the only one I disliked because literally all of
| their icons looked the same. The Apple ones are all fairly
| recognizable just by colour. Settings: grey, App store: blue,
| etc.
| gumby271 wrote:
| Except now the color can be completely themed right? By
| default it is, but it's hard to describe any of these icons
| if color is off the table.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The colour theming of icons is a bad feature IMO. Driven by
| the need to show new things in the latest update but makes
| usability of the phone much worse. At least its something
| you can just not use and it doesn't cause issues.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| I understand some people like skeuomorphism and that's fine. But
| I've noticed a certain arrogance skeuomorphism fans tend to have
| as if it's THE right way to design and everyone else is wrong.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| In the skeuomorphic era, people said, "This $object looks
| dumb."
|
| In the post-skeuomorphic era, people said, "I have no idea what
| this is, what it does, or what it means."
|
| Which is a better way to fail?
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Because it _is_ literally the best way to design and everyone
| else is wrong. Look at actual HCI studies. There 's exactly
| zero arguments for any kind of flat or minimalistic design
| outside of art, or if you want to make a statement.
|
| The only reason it's used that it's cheaper and faster to make,
| is perfectly soulless not to make anyone upset, and it's
| trendy.
| kace91 wrote:
| You're kinda proving the parent's point.
|
| >There's exactly zero arguments for any kind of flat or
| minimalistic design outside of art
|
| Here's one: helping the interface stay out of the way,
| removing clutter so the actual content of the app takes focus
| instead.
|
| I can tell you it works because with the new Glass stuff
| everything is begging for attention again, and I hate it.
|
| And just to be clear, I'm not voting for design overflattened
| to the point one can't tell icons apart. For me, around 4 in
| the diagram is the ideal middle point.
| adastra22 wrote:
| What's he's saying (behind too many opinions) is that
| actual HCI studies collected in something resembling a
| scientific manner show very clearly that skeuomorphic work
| better, for many clearly defined metrics of better.
| storus wrote:
| > helping the interface stay out of the way, removing
| clutter so the actual content of the app takes focus
| instead.
|
| Yeah, like when I need to guess what is clickable and what
| isn't...
| Pannoniae wrote:
| >You're kinda proving the parent's point.
|
| Exactly, I agree with the parent! They're right, it only
| happens that their strawman is actually true :)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| thank you for providing an exemplar
| 9dev wrote:
| > _There 's exactly zero arguments for any kind of flat or
| minimalistic design outside of art, or if you want to make a
| statement._
|
| If that were true, road signage would look a lot different
| than it does.
|
| Minimalistic design clearly has advantages when quickly
| grasping intent is key.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Road signage has a lot of constraints that don't apply to
| computer UIs.
| gumby271 wrote:
| Given the choice between "These icons look a bit garish in a
| subjective sense" and "what abstract art piece describes the
| Pages app" I'd rather have the one that's still useful. One
| benefit of skeuomorphism was the level of detail, that's fully
| been abandoned along with the affordances that brought.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| I've honestly never had an issue with using flat design. Or
| if I have, it hasn't been enough of an issue to remember. I
| don't mean this in a judgemental way, just that I
| legitimately don't understand why people care.
| gumby271 wrote:
| That's fair, it's not like this is completely breaking
| usability. But I have to ask, do you think the most recent
| pages icon is really the most accessible and useful version
| for this app? The logical end of the flat design and
| minimalism trend got us here and I think it's grossly over
| done.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| That's hard to answer because clearly my opinion is
| disconnected from most people. If this thread didn't
| exist I wouldn't give it more than a second though
| "that's the new icon ok"
| jmpeax wrote:
| Future icon will just be this: [?]
| gumby271 wrote:
| Slap a gradient on that bad boy and collect your Apple paycheck
| buddy!
| BanAntiVaxxers wrote:
| It seems like user interfaces should be decoupled from
| functionality of applications. Someone should be able to freeze
| their user interface in time if they wish.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Someone should be able to freeze their user interface in time
| if they wish.
|
| Why?
| layer8 wrote:
| For the same reason you can keep the interior design of your
| house the same for decades. Also, why not? It should just be
| a UI theme, decoupled from actual functionality.
| computersuck wrote:
| Because people are habitual, and mental load increases when
| you have to learn the UI again every update. Like if someone
| decided to change all your pots and pans every few months,
| it's harzadous for cooking.
| wtetzner wrote:
| So you don't have to put up with constantly changing UIs that
| don't improve anything, but require effort to relearn?
| rpdillon wrote:
| Because having somebody wander into your house one night and
| rearrange the rooms and the furniture is an impediment to
| getting work done the next day.
| Gigachad wrote:
| This is kind of how things used to be when you had 3rd party
| clients for things like email/irc/XMPP. Eventually it was
| decided that having a unified design and feature set was much
| more beneficial and simple for users than being able to theme
| the client.
| strobe wrote:
| probably more beneficial for business not for a users.
| linguae wrote:
| I agree. Six years ago during COVID I wrote a document
| describing my idea of a dream personal computing environment,
| where all functionality is accessible using an API, enabling
| scripting and customizable UIs. UIs are simply shells covering
| functionality provided by various objects.
|
| Unfortunately I haven't had the time to implement this vision,
| but Smalltalk environments such as Squeak and Pharo appear to
| be great environments to play around with such ideas, since
| everything is a live object.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It's not a novel idea: I've also invented that, as have most
| people I know who've thought about this problem. (This is a
| _good_ thing: it means it 'll be fairly easy to bootstrap a
| collaborative project.) I never got as far as writing up a
| full document, though: only scattered notes for my own use.
| Would you mind sharing yours?
| linguae wrote:
| Sure: this is the document that I wrote about building a
| component-based desktop:
|
| https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-proposal-
| for...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| This is not the most developed form of this idea that
| I've seen, but it does contain a good justification
| section. I don't think I've ever seen someone trying to
| _justify_ this before. (I 'd challenge the idea that
| touchscreen users liked Windows 8: afaik, things were
| _most_ confusing for them, unless they were already used
| to the much-more-sensible Windows Phone interface. Lots
| of important stuff in Windows 8 was hidden behind right-
| click, and Metro did not make it obvious that press-and-
| hold was doing anything until the context menu popped up.
| Don 't get me started on Charms: https://devblogs.microso
| ft.com/oldnewthing/20180828-00/?p=99... tells you all you
| need to know about the extent to which they were actually
| grounded in UI research.)
|
| For a system like this, you can't just have objects: you
| _need_ some kind of interface abstraction. One example
| from current OSs is the webview: you want to be able to
| choose which of LibreWolf, Vivaldi and Servo provides the
| webview component. But you also don 't want to be tied to
| one interface design (e.g. _this_ is what is meant by
| "rich text", now and forevermore), since that constrains
| the art of the possible. If you want to preserve
| backwards-compatibility, this means you need to allow
| interface transformers / adapters provided externally
| ("third-party") to the components they allow to
| communicate.
|
| Treating applications as monoliths isn't ideal, either:
| most applications are actually toolsuites. A word
| processor has multiple operations which can be performed
| on a document: some of these are tightly-linked to the
| document representation (e.g. formatting), but others are
| loosely-coupled (e.g. spellcheck). We can break these
| operations out as separate objects by constructing an
| interface for the document representation they expect:
| this would provide a kind of mutable view (called a
| "lens", in academic literature; known as "getters and
| setters" to most programmers), allowing GIMP plug-ins to
| see a GIMPDrawable while exposing a Krita Document to a
| Krita plug-in. (Or ideally something more specific than
| "Krita Document", but Krita's documentation is awful.)
| (These would, of course, be very complicated translation
| layers to write, so it might make more sense to do things
| the other way around to begin with: produce a simpler
| interface, and expose the resulting tools in both Krita
| and GIMP.)
|
| In principle, documents can get arbitrarily complex.
| Microsoft's OLE architecture was a good first start, but
| it was still "composition of monoliths". You couldn't run
| spell-check on an OLE document _and_ all its child
| documents. Perhaps a solution for this lies in ontology
| logs, though for pragmatic reasons you 'd want a way to
| select the best translation from a given set of almost-
| commuting paths. (The current-day analogue for this would
| be the Paste Special interface: I'm sure everyone has a
| story about all of the options being lossy in _different_
| ways, and having to manually combine them to get the
| result you want. This is an inevitable failure mode of
| this kind of ad-hoc interoperability, and one we 'd
| _need_ to plan around.)
|
| For describing interfaces, we want to further decouple
| what it _is_ from what it _looks like_. If I update
| Dillo, I want all right-click context menu entries from
| the new version to appear, but I still want the overall
| style to remain the same. There are multiple approaches,
| including CSS and monkeypatching (and I 've written about
| others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28172874),
| but I think we at _least_ need a declarative interface
| language / software interface renderer distinction. Our
| interface language should describe the _semantics_ of the
| interface, mapping to simple calls into the (stateful)
| object providing our user interface (sitting on top of
| the underlying API, to provide the necessary decoupling
| between the conceptual API, and the UI-specific
| implementation details). The semantics should at _least_
| support a mapping from WAI-ARIA, but ideally should
| support all the common UI paradigms in some way -
| obviously, in such a fashion that it is not too hard to
| convert a tabbed pane into a single region with section
| headings (by slapping another translation layer on top,
| or otherwise).
|
| Then, there should be interface-editing interfaces, which
| will be relatively simple to produce once all the
| underlying work has been done. The interface-editing
| interface will, naturally, let you draw on backgrounds,
| spell-check your labels, change fonts... using the same
| tools and toolbars as you use in any other program - or a
| toolbar you've cobbled together yourself, by grabbing
| bits from existing applications.
|
| ---
|
| Since translation can get _quite_ involved in this scheme
| (e.g. if you 're trying to use an Image Editor v1 pencil
| on an Image Editor v43 canvas, there might be 18
| different changes to pixel buffer representation in the
| pile of compatibility layers), this system would benefit
| from being able to recompile components as-needed, to
| keep the system fast. We'd want a compiler with excellent
| support for the as-if rule, and languages high-level
| enough to make that easy. We'd also want to make sensible
| decisions about _what_ to compile: it _might_ make sense
| to specialise the Image Editor v1 pencil to use the Image
| Editor v43 interface, or it might make sense to compile
| the Image Editor v1 - Image Editor v43 compatibility
| chain into a single translation layer, or it might make
| sense to use a more generic Raster Canvas interface
| instead. This decision-making could take into account how
| the software is actually used, _or_ we could make it the
| responsibility of distro maintainers - or even both, akin
| to Debian 's popularity contest.
|
| Recompilation tasks should be off-loaded to a queue, to
| give the user as much control as they want (e.g. they
| might not want to run a 30-minute max-out-the-processor
| compilation job while on battery, or an organisation
| might want to handle it centrally on their build
| servers). Since modular systems with sensible interfaces
| _tend_ to be more secure (there are fewer places for
| vulnerabilities to hide, since modules are only as
| tightly-integrated as their interfaces support), we
| wouldn 't expect to need as many (or as large) security
| updates, but the principles are similar.
|
| This would only become a problem after a few years,
| though, so the MVP need not include any recompilation
| functionality: naively chaining interfaces is Good
| Enough(tm).
| mitkebes wrote:
| A lot of Linux programs are command line only, with multiple
| GUIs available to use them. Sounds similar to what you're
| describing.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| That's not really that much different from what already
| exists in the FOSS ecosystem and UNIX.
| hackshack wrote:
| Between this, and icon-only toolbars and ribbons, I think we're
| reinventing Chinese, badly. Ideographic characters can often
| convey meaning succinctly.
|
| My vote is to either go back to picture icons, or use Chinese
| characters with localized pronunciation, so Che or Che is car,
| and so on.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Chinese is not in any way ideographic unless you are already
| partially literate.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| They are of you go far enough back. This is what Che looked
| like around 1000 BC: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
| %E8%BB%8A-oracle.svg...
| SahAssar wrote:
| It's still ideographic but not legible, right?
|
| Just like most software icons are not legible without prior
| knowledge like arrow down mean to save, a circle with a line
| mean power on/off, etc. Both are ideographic, and I guess
| some software icons might be a bit more pictographic (like a
| cogwheel meaning settings because you are interacting with
| the machine).
| cml123 wrote:
| Incidentally, the largest group of Chinese characters are
| phono-semantic e.g. encode both meaning and pronunciation.
| Over half of all Chinese characters are in that bucket.
| That actually allows speakers to have some ability to guess
| both pronunciation and meaning of characters they have
| never seen. There are rules to guide this.[0]
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C7%92u_bi%C4%81n_d%C3%BA
| _bi%...
| card_zero wrote:
| ...in Standard Chinese only, other varieties having very
| different pronunciations, right?
| adastra22 wrote:
| In Classical Chinese actually. Mandarin, which I assume
| you mean, is not the language these characters were
| designed for. But it is related enough that the phonetic
| hints often (but not always) help.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That might be a better word to use, maybe. But I'm not sure
| there was an adequate word for the point I was trying to
| make.
|
| The linguistic definition of ideographic is that it is a
| language which uses symbols to represent concepts, rather
| than just literal pictures (pictographic) or sounds
| (alphabet or syllabrie).
|
| Linguistics textbooks as far as I'm aware do not define
| symbol in this context, but generally a symbol seeks to
| _represent_ the concept. Emoji are great symbols - you see
| an emoji and you largely understand its meaning, even if
| you have never seen it before.
|
| The modern Chinese writing system is so abstracted that
| even an otherwise highly educated person that just lacks
| exposure to Chinese written script would have absolutely no
| idea what any of the characters mean. Yi , Er , San , sure.
| Beyond that, no fucking clue.
|
| So yeah, they wouldn't be legible. Because as symbols, they
| objectively suck until you learn the basic components,
| structure, and patterns of organization of the characters.
|
| So to the extent that an ideographic language conveys words
| as ideas through symbology, and to the uninitiated these
| symbols lack all meaning, it's not really ideographic is
| it?
|
| But yeah, not legible might have gotten the point across
| better.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > So to the extent that an ideographic language conveys
| words as ideas through symbology, and to the uninitiated
| these symbols lack all meaning, it's not really
| ideographic is it?
|
| If I write math equations in an unfamiliar and
| inscrutable notation does that somehow make them "not
| math"?
|
| I don't think ideography is in the eye of the beholder
| but rather the creator. Using the uninitiated as your
| standard doesn't seem to work very well for most things
| beyond the absolute basics.
|
| The key observation here with relevance to the original
| topic would probably be that icons that are legible to
| the uninitiated are likely to be of benefit. Even if you
| don't really care to accommodate them it's still going to
| help you to get your choices adopted.
|
| Thus an amusing thought occurs to me. If we did want to
| switch to Chinese characters for icons it would probably
| make sense to do so gradually, one app every six months
| or so.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Many characters aren't ideographic at all. Nothing at all
| about the structure of De (genitive case marker), Shi
| (be), or You (have) hints towards their meaning. A number
| of others like Hao (good) are ideographic only through
| convoluted and unintuitive etymologies.
| thfuran wrote:
| If you put the history of the orthography in reverse, it
| looks like someone getting good at drawing.
| Y_Y wrote:
| That's a bit harsh, I'd say no less than 80% of HN commenters
| are partially literate.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Icon - Ideographic character is a really interesting connection
| I've never seen made before that seems to capture what is going
| on. Don't agree with your conclusion to "use chinese
| characters" though. I don't think it's easy to tell what they
| depict.
| compounding_it wrote:
| My sister is switching to macOS and she won't be able to tell
| this is a word app. She won't be able to notice it with the ink
| bottle either. These represent the pen when ideally they should
| represent the document which is what the word app does. I have to
| admit Microsoft office apps actually have / have had sensible
| icons.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| But why threads?
| toast0 wrote:
| It's been so long since I used a mac that I don't recognize any
| of these icons (or maybe it's a iPad thing?)
|
| What app is it even for? The middle one looks like writing
| something. The left ones look like drawing a line or
| testing/calibrating a stylus? The inkpot? I don't even. And the
| two on the middle right look like desktop publishing?
| rovr138 wrote:
| Pages is Apple's word processing program.
| esafak wrote:
| All the same thing.
| benfrancom wrote:
| I've always liked Jakub Steiner's Gnome icon work:
| https://jimmac.eu/
| rsolva wrote:
| GNOME generally seem to have struck a nice balance over the
| years. Icons has a reasonable amount of skeuomorphism without
| too much hyperdetailed textures, most icons has distinct shapes
| (not just a bunch of boxes with rounded corners).
|
| I used to rice my linux desktop, but havefound less reason to
| do so the last ~5 years, and have been happy using the defaults
| in Fedora. I spend most of my time in a terminal, the browser
| and a few select GTK utilities apps, like Switcheroo, Curtail,
| Netsleuth etc.
|
| Maybe it is the somewhat slower, more iterative pace of GNOME,
| compared to macOS an Windows, that ends up with a more balanced
| end result?
| seydor wrote:
| It looks like a child growing
| heliographe wrote:
| Oh hi everyone! So funny to see how my quippy little tweet blew
| up the last few days on all the platforms (much more than when I
| share actual things I make, to my great dismay - if you're an
| artist/photographer, check out my apps & tools:
| https://heliographe.studio).
|
| There's lots of interesting discussions to be had around what
| makes a great icon (but social media platforms aren't the places
| to have those deep conversations). For example the original Mac
| HIG says that an app icon should:
|
| - clearly represent the document the application creates
|
| - use graphics that convey meaning about what your application
| does
|
| (https://www.threads.com/@heliographe.studio/post/DTehlciE3wY)
|
| The first point might be a little outdated, as we tend to live in
| a "post-document" world, especially on mobile. The second is
| broad enough that it holds up, and under that lens it doesn't
| seem that an image of a pen/stylus is most appropriate for a word
| processor app.
|
| By that metric, the Mavericks/Catalina (5th and 6th on the linked
| image) seem like the strongest icons. The Big Sur (4th) one isn't
| too bad given the "must fit in a squircle constraints" that came
| with it, but it starts to feel less like a word processor app
| icon - it could as easily be an icon for TextEdit/Notes.
|
| The most recent 3 are very hard to defend - the main thing they
| have going for them is that because they are simpler and
| monochromatic, they fit more easily within a broader design
| system/icon family. Even then, the simpler shape doesn't make
| them more legible - a number of people have told me they thought
| it was a bandaid at first, or maybe something terminal-related
| for the orange on black one. The "line" under the pencil (or is
| it a shadow?) on the most recent one is almost as thick as the
| pencil itself, and blends with it because gestalt theory.
|
| I agree that the 7th one (original ink bottle) has a few issues
| that don't necessarily make it the best choice for an icon - but
| dang, the level of craft that goes into it makes it an instant
| classic for me. And it does retain a fairly distinct, legible
| shape that still makes it a solid icon even if the detail gets
| lost at smaller sizes.
|
| Icons need to be quickly recognizable, but at the same time an
| icon is not a glyph - and illustrational approach do have their
| place. Especially on devices with larger screens where they are
| going to appear quite large in most contexts.
|
| The big elephant in the room with all this is that icons 5/6/7
| clearly take more craft skill to execute than icons 1/2/3, and
| Apple used to be the absolute reference - no debate possible -
| when it came to these matters. As a long time software designer
| (and former Apple designer myself through the 2010s, although I
| was on the hardware interaction design side, and not making
| icons), it is sad that this is no longer true.
| wingman-jr wrote:
| I grew up with Hypercard etc. and always loved the classic
| icons, like these:
| https://99percentinvisible.org/article/designed-with-kare-in...
| Don't suppose you've ever extended the timeline further back? I
| bet there would be some interesting discussion!
| consumer451 wrote:
| Thanks for posting here. Just installed your BitCam app and I
| love it!
| quitit wrote:
| Didn't Icon Factory make that?
| https://iconfactory.com/bc.html
| consumer451 wrote:
| Hmm, it was on the link OP provided:
| https://heliographe.studio/
|
| Oh, I see:
|
| > In October 2025, the software studio Heliographe, Inc.
| acquired the retro photography app BitCam from its original
| creator, The Iconfactory
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| Just want to say your apps look great, and I am actually
| jealous that I use android!
| quitit wrote:
| Since you have a lot to say about these icons, I took a moment
| to look at your app icons.
|
| Why are all of your icons terrible?
| bze12 wrote:
| Apple mostly cares about legibility and consistency in icons now,
| not art. All the new iOS features like tints and liquid glass
| don't lend themselves well to intricate designs. It's
| disappointing, but I tend to agree that the skeuomorphic icons
| are harder to read.
|
| From their icon guidelines: "Embrace simplicity in your icon
| design. Simple icons tend to be easiest for people to understand
| and recognize. An icon with fine visual features might look busy
| when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights..."
| https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
|
| Self plug, but I made an app related to this - it's a conceptual
| art gallery for app icons. I thought it would be an interesting
| experiment to remove the functional premise and just let an icon
| be a decorative symbol. It's called 001 (https://001.graphics)
| amluto wrote:
| > Apple mostly cares about legibility and consistency in icons
| now, not art.
|
| The second-to-oldest one is legible. The word "PAGES" is quite
| legible. It's pretty clear what's going on. In fact, it's the
| only one in the entire set where I would look at the icon and
| quickly recognize what it is and what it's for. (The one that
| is one iteration newer is worse because it's less legible.)
| dd8601fn wrote:
| Nobody is mentioning that there's essentially nowhere you see
| the icon now without the name (internationalized) unless
| you're already familiar with it, and pinned it to a launcher
| or something.
|
| The first time you see most of them they're on a page with
| screenshots and descriptions.
|
| Nobody needs to know what the Word icon is before they know
| what Word is.
| amluto wrote:
| I have icons of apps I've used many times visible in a
| launcher, and I still have to think about which is which
| because they are so nondescript.
| com2kid wrote:
| I use a Mac daily, have for years now. I did not recognize that
| the icon in the article was for "pages" until it came to the
| icon with the word pages on it.
|
| The icon is horrible and generic and has failed to leave an
| impression on me over multiple years.
| gumby271 wrote:
| It feels like Apple did all of this in reverse. They created a
| new UI system and effects that look like shit with any amount
| of fine detail, and now suddenly their design guide says
| "actually fine details are bad for the user". They didn't come
| up with a good design, they came up with a shader tech demo and
| had to make a design that works with that new constraint.
| thfuran wrote:
| Yeah, rendering at smaller sizes is one thing, but icons
| being made uninterpretable by system provided shadows and
| highlighting seems like an unforced error.
| dd8601fn wrote:
| Most of their icons became (or have always been) very simple
| since long, long before that existed.
| Karliss wrote:
| I disagree with Apple caring about legibility. You can have
| legibility in simplicity but apple isn't doing that.
|
| Legibility requires contrast, the whole liquid glass
| transparent background thing kills contrast and thus
| legibility. Having random noise from the background windows
| kills legibility.
|
| As for icons specifically - having white semitransparent
| (vertical gradient) shape on top of brighter color background
| makes it harder to perceive the shape which is currently only
| remaining distinguishing feature. Half of them are gray on
| gray. If you can't recognize the shape while squinting your
| eyes then it's not a good legible shape for icon. The
| Messages/FaceTime is other comments mentioned is one of the
| best/worst examples of this. In theory shape of camera and
| speech bubble are unique, but in practice the real difference
| is very small. They are both similar size elongated blobs.
| Messages have tiny little triangle in bottom left corner,
| camera has two notches. Overall and in combination with color
| choice this makes it harder to recognize the shape. Phone also
| uses the same color but at least the general shape is
| significantly different.
|
| It's not all completely bad. The rainbow button strip and
| darker background for Audio Midi setup in my opinion made it
| more distinct. The contact icon also improved contrast, but
| only because old one had very bad contrast.
|
| There are plenty of others where contrast was made worse. For
| example Time machine, Font book, Clock, Finder.
| jiehong wrote:
| Strangely, the new Preview app icon on iOS is quite
| skeuomorphic and depicting something almost nobody ever needs
| to do anymore in the last few decades (looking at small
| negatives or positives throughly a magnifying glass, or maybe
| micro documents?)
| undebuggable wrote:
| There was more meeting time and salary budget involved in picking
| the yellow-red gradient inside a pen from the first icon on the
| left, that in the entire process of creating and releasing the
| icon first from the right.
| canadiantim wrote:
| What's even more surprising is someone linking to a threads link!
| samlinnfer wrote:
| It's just fashion, it's cyclical, what is out of style
| (skeuomorphism) comes into style again, then it goes away for
| simplicity.
| sippeangelo wrote:
| Is it? I've seen us going from obvious skeuomorphism to more
| and more abstract shapes, until we hit peak Windows 8 hubris
| where everything is a coloured square with a monochrome symbol
| in it. Then back to icons where shades of colour and contrast
| finally start meaning things again, but getting stuck in an
| endless balancing on the edge where icons are abstract enough
| to confuse but not clear enough to describe their function.
| We've never gotten fully back to actual skeuomorphism.
| samlinnfer wrote:
| I would argue that realistic looking icons that look like the
| real object is skeuomorphism.
| sippeangelo wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say! The furthest right
| icon of this post is peak skeuomorphism, but we've never
| actually gotten back to it. Someone's always gone "wait,
| this icon looks a bit too much like the real thing, we
| can't have that!". It has never been cyclical!
| zabzonk wrote:
| Off-topic, I guess, but on-screen icons are not the only things
| you have to puzzle about. On my quite new Asus laptop (which I
| really like) there is a key on the keyboard that launches Asus's
| My Asus application, which does hardware-specific configuration.
| I like the app, I like easy access to it - what I don't
| understand is why the label on the key is "//]".
| sedatk wrote:
| It's the MyASUS app logo. Possibly designed to look like
| letters M & A mashed together.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Yes, you are right, it is a (bad) representation of what the
| My Asus app puts up on the Windows taskbar - I hadn't noticed
| that. But even then, I can't see it as M & A. But this is all
| OT, and I'm not expecting any explanations here. Thanks.
| sedatk wrote:
| Think of an italic _M_ and an upright A.
| LandoCalrissian wrote:
| I tend to like skeuomorphic design, however, if you design an
| entire interface that way, it will look dated, for better or
| worse.
|
| The one in the middle is probably what I would gravitate towards
| myself. The right three really wear their date on their sleeve.
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| GUIs' beneficial "skeuomorphism" probably peaked around the
| mid-'90s, where controls and their states were clearly
| demarcated but not absurdly photo-realistic. The bevel on a
| button told you if it was depressed or not, but that amounted
| to flipping the brightness on a couple of pixel-wide outlines.
|
| Apple did contribute to the backlash (and the over-correction
| to no design at all, AKA "flat") with their brain-dead
| skeuomorphic UI. One example hobbled iTunes for years: Apple
| depicted the current-track display at the top of the iTunes
| window as an "LCD" with a glass window over it; obviously you
| wouldn't try to interact or press on a glass-covered LCD. But
| in iTunes, there were controls hidden in there. WTF? Why would
| you ever even attempt to click in it?
|
| Equally stupid was Game Center, where Apple depicted controls
| as painted onto the felt of a Blackjack table. Who the hell
| would attempt to "operate" the paint on a felt gambling-table
| surface?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| "Dated" is subjective, and not worth worrying about. I don't
| care if something looks dated, I care if it's clear and easy to
| use.
| dd8601fn wrote:
| Little children operate these devices competently.
|
| The usability of this stuff is not worse. It's just taste.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Enough trial and error will allow you to learn any system
| no matter how obtuse - it doesn't mean the system is well
| designed.
|
| I'd argue the usage patterns of children using the device
| for entertainment and adults using the device for
| productivity are quite different.
| nemosaltat wrote:
| See also: https://rakhim.exotext.com/benjamin-button-reviews-
| macos
| timcobb wrote:
| Nothing like arguing about icons on HN on Saturday night. Bless
| you folks
| cycomanic wrote:
| Why are people arguing that icons should be intuitively tell you
| what the app is about? Since when was that the goal of an icon
| (in paritucal an app icon)? It should be easily distinguishable
| from other icons. If I don't know what the icon means it will
| take me exactly 1s to find out by clicking on it, after that I
| will know what the app icon is for, and I only care if I can
| distinguish it easily from other icons, so I don't accidentally
| start a different app.
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| You must be a huge fan of purposefully obscure HN titles.
|
| And Concentration. Click on the giraffe to get to the Print
| dialog!
|
| Hm... what was the Print dialog hidden under again?
| qingcharles wrote:
| My language app is an owl.
|
| My web browser is a fox curled up.
|
| My media player is a traffic cone.
|
| Out of the 40 app icons on my taskbar, maybe three of them
| remotely indicate the product's purpose.
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| app icons [?] icons for functions within an app
|
| But you knew that.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| The first comment was about app icons. Nobody is
| suggesting putting confusing buttons in an app UI.
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| No; they're actually doing it!
|
| But... your point is valid. I didn't interpret the
| original comment as being limited to app icons, but on
| another read you are right; it does emphasize them.
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| why shouldn't an icon be at least partially skeuomorphic?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I strongly agree. But (having just replied to someone else
| about ideography) it leads to an interesting thought. Once you
| learn them the app icons become a shared legible writing
| system. Going to drive to the store? Go lang, Google Drive,
| Play Store. You get the idea.
|
| It's a trademark violating abomination but I think we ought to
| give it a try.
| wtetzner wrote:
| I guess that would be fine if the icon for a given app didn't
| keep changing.
| pibaker wrote:
| You have to wonder if the people so performatively mad about
| incomprehensible "modern" logos feel similarly about VLC player
| or foobar2000.
|
| It all seems to be just the prevalent anti-big tech cynicism
| finding an easily upvoted outlet.
| dd8601fn wrote:
| I don't think this is just how it should be... I think it's how
| things already are.
|
| I looked back at the old "back when they were good!" examples
| and realized that six of them could be the same app and none of
| us would know.
|
| I used those icons (and their applications), and I'm far enough
| removed in time to not remember which was which.
|
| All of this only further cements the idea that the users bring
| way more to this than the supposed design theories.
|
| But we sure do like the idea of modern masters reaching into
| the human psyche with phenomenally intuitive icon design.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Apple's HIG:
|
| - clearly represent the document the application creates
|
| - use graphics that convey meaning about what your application
| does
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| Apple's guidelines have long been flouted by Apple itself,
| not to mention that they're replete with stupid ideas.
|
| I've developed a few iOS apps, and one of my favorite Apple
| "guidelines" (which they essentially enforced at the OS level
| without developer choice) was that, upon launch, your app
| should show a fake UI while doing startup tasks in the
| background. The recommendation was part of Apple's
| admonishment against splash screens. Think about how dumb
| this is, and how it makes your app look inept. Apparently
| plenty of developers did, and shunned this dumb idea; because
| Apple then forced it on developers whenever technically
| possible.
|
| Upon your app going into the background or being kicked out
| of memory, Apple will take a screenshot of what your app is
| showing. When the user returns to your application, Apple
| will present this old screen shot; but none of the controls
| on it will work. The user can tap away furiously, but nothing
| will happen. When the app returns to functionality, the
| screen will be replaced by the real UI.
|
| The problem here goes beyond ineptitude into a major privacy
| issue. You can think you "closed" or changed what an
| application is showing before handing your device to someone,
| only to find that Apple still shows a screen shot of its old
| contents in the open-apps stack. This could be a disaster.
| moonshadow565 wrote:
| That website (threads.com) does not load properly on firefox on
| phone. Most of images are missing and layout is all messed up.
| megablast wrote:
| The designers at Apple have a lot to answer for. It's as if we
| can no longer trust Apple to make new versions better.
| Bad_Initialism wrote:
| As the icons progress to the left, identification increasingly
| depends on colour and shape. Since there are a limited number of
| colours and shapes, they tend to get reused. This increasingly
| leads to mis-identification of icons.
|
| This is particularly true for the visually impaired and some
| elderly and neuro-atypical people.
|
| What matters in an icon is uniqueness. Only the skeuomorphic
| icons to the right can be unique enough for proper
| identification.
|
| Trendiness of visual appearance has no place in the functionality
| of a complex machine. If you think it does, I submit the
| following for your consideration: you. are. a. monster.
|
| Yes, I said that and I mean it. You followers of Jony Ive and his
| ilk are assholes. The rest of us don't give a shit about your
| design schools. We just want to be able to click on the right
| thing.
|
| Hate me, but it's true.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| > identification increasingly depends on colour and shape.
|
| If only they would stop there. These design terrorists won't
| even let us have that much; Google's Android apps all use the
| same 4-color-rainbow scheme. Not only did they get rid of the
| ability to visually identify the icons by color, but you can't
| even really identify them by shape because applying four highly
| constrasting colors to a simple shape breaks up its silhouette
| into something that is not quickly recognisable at a glance.
| It's as though they're intentionally trying to make the icons
| have as little functional utility as they possibly can.
| hliyan wrote:
| The worst part is, when computer screens were monochrome or
| had only 16 colors, (and perhaps 16 pixels a side) to work
| with, designers managed to create more distinct icons or
| pictograms. Perhaps they may not have looked as elegant as a
| set of items on a collector's display case, but they helped
| the end user quickly zero in on the part of the screen they
| were interested in.
| quitit wrote:
| Google's icons are basically just different shapes of the
| same rainbow camouflage.
|
| While I agree that Google's is not a good approach, that is
| not what has gone on here.
| Washuu wrote:
| > This is particularly true for the visually impaired and some
| elderly and neuro-atypical people.
|
| The Slack and (Google) Photos icons on Android look so visually
| similar in the sea of green, blue, red, and yellow icons on
| Android that I frequently open the wrong application. Using my
| phone sucks.
| pastor_williams wrote:
| I don't know if you can change the icons with the default
| launcher, but you can with Nova Launcher. I changed pocket's
| icon to a taco. Not to make it visually distinct but because
| the placement of the icon on the background made it look like
| it was going into someone's mouth and I thought it was funny.
| Anyway, opportunities exist to improve your phone experience
| without needing to depend on Google to come to its senses.
| opan wrote:
| Not sure if this will help you, but I keep just one
| homescreen page with my most-used apps on it, and I've
| developed muscle memory for all of them. When I set up a new
| device, I put the same apps in the same spots. Other than the
| inherent inaccuracy of touchscreens, I could probably open
| any of them blindly. I also only fill up the bottom half or
| so of the screen, so they're all easy enough to reach.
| Insanity wrote:
| De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum.
|
| I prefer the consistent design language which is harder to do
| with the less abstract designs from earlier Mac days.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Here's a wild idea, what if the option was given to the user to
| select the level of detail for icons?
|
| We have such a vast library of icons now, make it an option in
| System Settings.
|
| Call it themes or whatever, I'm sure every macOS enjoyer would
| love to play with the options and reminisce.
|
| Celebrate your rich design history, don't trample it!
| kyleee wrote:
| The fancy design types will never allow it. They love
| controlling people and forcing their designs and "improvements"
| on people
| mrweasel wrote:
| Customization = You can pick a different wallpaper, if you
| really want to.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Same reason as to why they make it so difficult/impossible to
| opt out of updates or control them granularly - I suspect deep
| down they know full well nobody wants their new trash so the
| only way to get any kind of adoption is to force people.
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| Kye wrote:
| Threads pages don't load for me. Is there a non-Threads option
| for this?
| heliographe wrote:
| Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@heliographe_studio/1158908
| 195095453...
| derrida wrote:
| That link is hidden. No I am not signing up to what ever site
| that is because it breaks the web and obviously wants to live
| rent free on open standards.
| heliographe wrote:
| Here is the same post on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@h
| eliographe_studio/1158908195095453...
|
| I publish all my posts on Threads/X/Bluesky/Mastodon because
| I have to meet my customers where they are, but Mastodon is
| the preferred platform that I point everyone to for open
| standards reasons.
|
| (if a moderator doesn't mind updating the link, that'd be
| great)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You can email hn@ycombinator.com if you don't want to wait
| for one of the (very small) team to stumble across your
| comment.
| heliographe wrote:
| Done, cheers for the heads up.
| dang wrote:
| OK, updated from https://www.threads.com/@heliographe.studi
| o/post/DTeOwAykwQ1 at the top. Thanks!
| gmd63 wrote:
| The old skeuomorphic Apple icons were so easily distinguishable
| and yet still identifiable as Apple, a tough act to balance today
| amid competing design languages in oceans of competing apps. I
| thought they were great.
|
| That pen and ink icon had a classic feel to it. It made me think
| about the time and effort demanded by handwriting that I was
| bypassing by opening that app. That kind of visual poetry is lost
| in these flat designs, where communicating membership in a
| brand's ecosystem seems to beat out other priorities.
| chongli wrote:
| The best icon is the original MacWrite icon by Susan Kare [1]. No
| superfluous details, simple, and communicates the act of writing
| perfectly.
|
| Susan's suite of original icons for the Macintosh set a high
| watermark for legibility, usability, and comforting design. We
| really haven't returned to that level of ease of use ever since.
|
| [1]
| https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XLfMbsAfWqc/Vtae74eUHmI/AAAAAAAAH...
| (bottom row, 3rd from right)
| stego-tech wrote:
| One thing I'm not seeing much of in the comments, that I think is
| worthwhile to highlight:
|
| _Every single one_ of these icons should be available to choose
| by the user.
|
| Some folks make good icons; others do not. Taste is highly
| subjective, and this applies to user interfaces moreso than user
| experience.
|
| _Interfaces_ should always be customizable; _experiences_ should
| always be consistent.
| dudus wrote:
| Ghostty is an example of a program that gives you a bunch of
| different icons to choose from and an easy way to customize it
| even further.
|
| I don't know any other
| stego-tech wrote:
| Plex does - if you give them money. A lot of app packages
| offer customizable icons provided you give them money for the
| privilege.
|
| I disagree with this approach, and vendors that lock such
| changes down. If a user wants to replace every single app
| icon with a PNG or SVG of their choosing, that should be
| permissible at the OS-level. Users should _always_ have the
| final say over their interface choices, and corporate or
| software-maker changes regarding aesthetics /interfaces
| should never override what the user has chosen for
| themselves.
|
| Right now there's strong overlap in interfaces and
| experiences that make this difficult, if not impossible to
| execute on. Separating the two again is critical for
| computing to be accessible to all, as is maintaining a
| consistent experience throughout interface changes.
| jicea wrote:
| GitHub official app icon on iOS is also configurable with ~40
| variants.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Every single one of these icons should be available to
| choose by the user._
|
| They are. You can replace the icon of any app straight in
| Finder, in the Get Info window. Copy the icon from somewhere
| else, click the icon in Get Into to select it, and Cmd+V to
| paste.
|
| I mean, you'll need to get the original icon, but that's not
| too much work. I don't think Apple themselves should be
| shipping every high-resolution icon they've ever used for every
| app. OS's are already large enough.
| 1bpp wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea you could do that
| eviks wrote:
| Will it survive an update/reinstall?
| hoherd wrote:
| No, unfortunately it doesn't. I've also looked for a way to
| script this and came up empty handed. If somebody knows how
| to programmatically set a custom icon for an app or
| arbitrary file in macOS, please speak up.
| svantana wrote:
| I've attempted this for the brave browser, which has a
| horrible icon in my opinion. It works but the original one
| self-restores after some time, even without updating the app.
| pornel wrote:
| Apple was never keen on customization, and instead they wanted
| to offer a good experience out of the box as a package (take it
| or leave it).
|
| The problem is that Apple has lost good taste and judgement.
| And their App Store obsession turned "we've made it so simple
| you don't need to customize it" into "you're not allowed to
| touch our precious OS, you additional-service-revenue-dodging
| bastards".
| CharlesW wrote:
| "I don't like the style of Apple's icons. It's like they're not
| even trying!"
|
| Meanwhile, at Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/products/catalog.html
| stephen_g wrote:
| My favourite is actually the one right in the middle, it's like
| things improved and then started going downhill again
| onion2k wrote:
| The icons have moved from representing a writing implement as a
| pen to an Apple Pencil. I doubt that's unintentional.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| If you work at Apple, I hope you see this.
| yndoendo wrote:
| The share holders are the users that big business now focus on,
| no the actual end users any more. They care more about the
| stock than the quality of product.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I like the middle ones but, come on, let's not pretend the ink
| pot isn't a load of skeuomorphic nonsense.
| yndoendo wrote:
| I would say the more detailed ones highlighted the quality of
| resolution and colors that Mac OS X had over Mac OS 9. It was
| way to bring back customers that left Apple for Windows.
| Microsoft had to update their OS icon standards to compete
| again.
| pibaker wrote:
| There are many complaints about "modern" logos being illegible
| and how it is impossible to guess the purpose of an app from the
| logo and I do not understand it. There was _never_ a period of
| time when you could just look at any logo and know what it is.
| Just to name a few examples here
|
| - Photoshop (used to be an eye, was briefly a feather, now just
| the word mark PS)
|
| - Foobar2000 (Alien???)
|
| - WinAMP (lightning?)
|
| - Google Chrome (I never figured out what it was supposed to be,
| just a ball of colors?)
|
| - Microsoft Word (what does W mean?)
|
| - Microsoft PowerPoint (look at the office 2000 version of
| PowerPoint, it has a pacman in it)
|
| - VLC player (what does a traffic cone have to do with playing
| video?)
|
| I think if anything has changed now and then, it was not how
| comprehensible logos became, but how cynical we ended up. We seem
| to have developed a knee jerk reaction to find anything about
| "modern tech" to hate on (on a forum owned by the company that
| funded much of the modern tech nonetheless) and it had colored
| our perception of how things really were in the past.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| > There was never a period of time when you could just look at
| any logo and know what it is
|
| None of your examples are for built-in applications. You have
| to go out of your way to download those programs. You'd know
| what the traffic cone means because you downloaded the program
| with the traffic cone. You went out of your way to get it.
|
| Let's go back to that era and look at some other built-in apps,
| like Pages is (these days).
|
| Notepad: a blue-covered notepad with some lined pages visible.
|
| Wordpad: a fountain pen writing on some lined paper. Eventually
| the pen disappeared but the paper remained.
|
| Paint: a paint palette, then a bucket of art supplies, then a
| glass cup with paintbrushes, then back to a palette but with a
| brush.
|
| Solitaire: a deck of cards.
|
| Outlook Express: an envelope.
|
| MSN Messenger: two people next to each other because they're
| communicating with each other.
|
| Windows Movie Maker: a film reel/strip.
|
| Internet Explorer: a big 'e' (for Explorer) with a planet-like
| ring around it, suggesting a planet that you could traverse.
| (Okay, a bit abstract)
|
| Over the Mac, there was:
|
| SimpleText: a pencil writing on a sheet of paper. Later re-used
| for TextEdit.
|
| Sherlock: a detective's cap and magnifying glass, indicating
| searching. The magnifying glass was later re-used for
| Spotlight.
|
| Disk First Aid: A floppy disk on the back of an ambulance.
|
| Disk Utility: a doctor's stethoscope pressed against a hard
| disk.
|
| etc.
|
| > it was not how comprehensible logos became, but how cynical
| we ended up
|
| Because, on macOS, none of the icons became any more
| comprehensible than before. If anything, they got less
| comprehensive even when the visual metaphor remained the same
| because the representation is so poor. That's what made
| everybody cynical.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Those icons were incredibly visually distinct, despite being
| meaningless. I still know exactly what they are for instantly,
| in my peripheral vision, years after using many of them.
|
| Modern icons are not only not comprehensible but not visually
| distinct (Tahoe making everything the same shape, many apps
| removing all colour from toolbar icons, various distinct if
| anachronistic symbolic icons like Save being replaced with
| slighly different orientations and arrangements of arrows and
| rounded rectangles...).
|
| This severely impacts the efficiency of user interaction,
| especially after the first time you use something, at least for
| me. It's not a knee jerk reaction, it's a reaction to actually
| feeling it becoming harder to use my computer.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > - VLC player (what does a traffic cone have to do with
| playing video?)
|
| Https://1000logos.net/vlc-logo
| cstuder wrote:
| Further essay on this topic:
| https://daringfireball.net/2026/01/thoughts_and_observations...
| gethly wrote:
| New icons are clearly made for mobile apps and not desktop
| programs. I think this trend started with iPad actually. And it
| makes sense if your entire OS UI is unified, but that is not the
| case on desktop computers, no matter the OS. So these new icons
| look out of place. Either immediately or after some time, after
| the novelty dissipates.
| qwertox wrote:
| I was thinking that the simpler the icons get, the easier it will
| be for the company to replace the designers by AI, then I started
| to guess the probability of it also being able to generate those
| "more elaborate" ones from the right. Sounds like they're in
| trouble. It will be so easy to automatically generate entire sets
| of icons.
| timeon wrote:
| This could be also: "which item does not belong to the sequence?"
|
| Answer would be: newest one. It feels uncanny.
|
| It tries to be simplified abstraction. But it is not. There are
| unnecessary details that are misleading. It does not abstract
| from the true meaning. Instead it transforms previous
| abstractions without understanding them.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It's weird trend, the more pixels we have the simpler and
| shittier designs are. Now Apple isn't too horrible (yet) but
| Google is downgrade after downgrade
| nashashmi wrote:
| This. I thought that as pixels went up, the designs would
| become more intricate. Granted, gradients are some show of that
| intricacy.
| altern8 wrote:
| The main problem with app icons these days IMO is that they have
| to place them into identical rounded boxes.
|
| They all look the same. When it was just the icon one was square,
| one was round, etc. and it was easier to tell them apart.
|
| There is also less room to work with, if 1/3 of it is padding for
| the rounded box.
| makerofthings wrote:
| I like the older icons so much more. I'm not in so much of a rush
| that I care about icons making it 2ms faster to differentiate and
| click the right thing. I want some character and some love in my
| GUI. I want different components clearly laid out, I want scroll
| bars. Favourite GUI, Windows 95 and Snow Leopard.
|
| I demand Whimsy.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| The old ones are easier to differentiate too
| nashashmi wrote:
| There is so much hate against these simple icons. But let's back
| up a second. Do you remember in 2008 when more and more startups
| were coming up and they didn't have the budget for really nice
| detailed icons? Those startups were so cool and simple. They made
| simple products. And users loved them.
|
| They established a trend: make your product dumber and simpler.
| Make it more accessible to these new little twerks from
| elementary grammar school who don't understand too much. Right
| now products are pretending to become simpler with a UI face. But
| tomorrow you will see them actually become simpler in
| functionality as well (like Markdown).
|
| Google workspace is riding this wave. They make their products
| for high schoolers. And now those same college going kids
| struggle with complex MS Office products.
| pshirshov wrote:
| I've preferred to use Mac for years until they reworked the
| settings.
|
| After that I've migrated to NixOS desktop. Just had a feeling
| that old Mac is dead and it's time to look for alternatives. But
| I kept buying Mac laptops.
|
| After Tahoe I've purchased a Framework laptop.
|
| This visual mess of small icons, huge rounded corners with
| varying radiuses, low contrast and blur is unbearable. Also a
| nice touch: the default wallpaper for dark mode was dark in all
| previous OS versions since Mojave. In Tahoe it depicts a sunny
| day (Tahoe Day). It's like Apple finally lost all the common
| sense.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| From a usability perspective, icon attributes ranked by
| importance: design consistency < contrast and ease of
| distinguishing < design that communicates what the icon does
| <<<<<< not changing after I memorize what the icon does
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| I personally prefer ones in the middle.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The worst output of Apple's iconography attempts recently has
| been Pixelmator's revised icon. Compare and contrast the
| original:
|
| https://www.pixelmator.com/cdn-web-assets/app-icons/ico_pixe...
|
| versus Apple's new Creator Studio version:
|
| https://www.apple.com/v/pixelmator-pro/a/images/overview/wel...
|
| I have basically no idea what it's meant to represent, apart from
| a very vague indication of the concept of "layers".
| jiehong wrote:
| The new icon looks a bit like the shortcut app icon to me.
| DetectDefect wrote:
| "To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript.
| Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your
| platform."
|
| Why do I need Javascript to look at some icons and (presumably)
| text? The server can't render these for me?
| unparagoned wrote:
| I'm not sure which way they are going. I like the ones on the
| left is that now or old?
| quitit wrote:
| The original inkpot Pages icon was beautiful, it looked great
| when steve jobs had it large on screen at macworld 2005 stating
| that Pages was "Word processing with an incredible sense of
| style". At the time this made sense for the Pages icon.
|
| However there are 3 things I notice about this discussion:
|
| 1. Gorgeous detailed renderings aren't symbols, nor are they
| necessarily good icons. Symbols are mentally quicker to
| understand, and that makes them ideal as the foundation of an
| icon, where their purpose is to communicate, not just be pretty.
| The new icons do this better than the older icons. Secondly the
| detailed illustrations aren't effective at small sizes, to use
| the ink pot example: the pen is lost in the detail of the ink
| pot, at typical viewing size it's a visually noisy design. I
| recall a criticism at the time being that people didn't know what
| they were looking at.
|
| 2. People such as John Gruber who referenced this post don't have
| the self-awareness to recognise that they are neither an expert
| on the topic nor the target demographic. Watching Gruber riot
| about unimportant minutae over the last few months has been an
| interesting case study. At no point does he show a modicum of
| charity whereby he tries to understand why the changes were made,
| instead his response can be summarised as a whiney/bratty version
| of "it's the children who are wrong".
|
| 3. There is an amusing and unpredictable cross over between
| people who think the ink pot is peak icon design, but have argued
| in the past that the much more recent floppy disk is too old to
| be used as a save icon.
| stephenlf wrote:
| I didn't learn much about icons in this thread, but I did learn
| that iconographers are a feisty bunch
| aristofun wrote:
| One of many examples of how you can take anything too far and
| make it worse
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Snow Leopard was right about everything
| shatsky wrote:
| Vibes of sunset of beautiful architecture. "It shouldn't be
| beautiful it's just a tool it should be practical, if it steals
| your attention [from some tiktok brainrot] to admire it it's not
| good thing". Can't say I like most detailed icons most, but not
| least detailed either.
| m4r1k wrote:
| I deeply miss Steve Jobs
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