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.
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.
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.
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.
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" ?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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 車 or 车 is car, and so on.
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).
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]
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.
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. 一, 二, 三, 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.
> 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.
Many characters aren't ideographic at all. Nothing at all about the structure of 的 (genitive case marker), 是 (be), or 有 (have) hints towards their meaning. A number of others like 好 (good) are ideographic only through convoluted and unintuitive etymologies.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 trés 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Yeah, rendering at smaller sizes is one thing, but icons being made uninterpretable by system provided shadows and highlighting seems like an unforced error.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 "//]".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
They were happy that someone finally made a decision, and freed them from the burden of fruitless repeated deliberation.
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/
Now all icons look alike, and it takes longer to recognize.
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.
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.
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.
I showed this timeline to non-technical people around me and they prefer... the original pen pot.
c) Pages plays for the Dodgers
aaahhh! i get it, it's a sports autographs app!
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.
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.
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.
if your users need billboards, then your job is to make great bill boards
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dead middle is decent too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As you, never seen these icons in my entire life.
The far left icon's color gradient and Apple Pencil shape made me think it was for drawing.
#4 or #5 are best at conveying what it is for and for being distinct from other 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.
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.
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.
My vote is to either go back to picture icons, or use Chinese characters with localized pronunciation, so 車 or 车 is car, and so on.
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).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C7%92u_bi%C4%81n_d%C3%BA_bi%...
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. 一, 二, 三, 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.
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.
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.
I don't know any other
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.
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.
It's a trademark violating abomination but I think we ought to give it a try.
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.
It all seems to be just the prevalent anti-big tech cynicism finding an easily upvoted outlet.
And Concentration. Click on the giraffe to get to the Print dialog!
Hm... what was the Print dialog hidden under again?
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.
But you knew that.
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.
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.
Of course picking a meaningful icon is trés 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?
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.
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?
- 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.
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.
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.
https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-proposal-for...
Why?
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)
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.
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.)
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.
The icon is horrible and generic and has failed to leave an impression on me over multiple years.
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.
The one in the middle is probably what I would gravitate towards myself. The right three really wear their date on their sleeve.
The usability of this stuff is not worse. It’s just taste.
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?
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!
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
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?
Meanwhile, at Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/products/catalog.html
I prefer the consistent design language which is harder to do with the less abstract designs from earlier Mac days.
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)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Yeah, like when I need to guess what is clickable and what isn't...
Exactly, I agree with the parent! They're right, it only happens that their strawman is actually true :)
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?
But I agree they don’t look pretty.
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)
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.
Correct. Word : Excel : Powerpoint :: Pages : Numbers : Keynote.