The thing that bothers me most about the direction of icons is the sameness of all their shapes, ignoring the rest of their appearance. This is a problem in bo

The thing that bothers me most about the direction of icons is the sameness of all their shapes, ignoring the rest of their appearance. This is a problem in both the Dock (where it seems everything is a circle nowadays) and in toolbars (where everything has an ugly white rounded-rectangle behind it, and is really tiny). There used to be explicit mention of the importance of varying shapes in toolbars, as part of Apple’s own interface guidelines. At a glance, it’s far easier to find things when there’s a triangle-like icon next to a round icon next to a square icon next to a home-plate-shaped icon, etc. If every icon has the same shape, and has been shrunk into that shape to leave even less space for meaningful details, it‘s almost not worth having an icon at all.