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.

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/

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Anyone else doesn't like modern minimalist icon design? It looks boring.

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 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 agree. The middle one seems to be the best combination of clarity and simplicity.

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.

Latest icons are also horrible. Magnifying glass for "open containing directory".

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.

Tbh I like the far left way more than the rest. It is simple, clear, and distinctive.

Dead middle is decent too.

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.

> 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.

Hey, thanks for posting here. Just installed your BitCam app and I love it!

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!

Chinese is not in any way ideographic unless you are already partially literate.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I guess that would be fine if the icon for a given app didn't keep changing.

why shouldn't an icon be at least partially skeuomorphic?

There is no such "design theory," only schools of design

On the phone you can now say "Command + space, then search pages"

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?

"Ink? Oh is that what's in the bottle?"

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.

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.

> Someone should be able to freeze their user interface in time if they wish.

Why?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

> 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.

> - VLC player (what does a traffic cone have to do with playing video?)

Https://1000logos.net/vlc-logo

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?

This. I thought that as pixels went up, the designs would become more intricate. Granted, gradients are some show of that intricacy.

"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.

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.

The fancy design types will never allow it. They love controlling people and forcing their designs and “improvements” on people

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.

Pages is Apple's word processing program.

All the same thing.

It's the MyASUS app logo. Possibly designed to look like letters M & A mashed together.

Slap a gradient on that bad boy and collect your Apple paycheck buddy!

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.

Is that what they learn at Symbolics Systems.

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.

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.

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?

The first 3 are just awful.

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?

What kind of knowledge does a 14you have to parse the two sticks in the first icon easier vs. remembering some school trivia?