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Adaptive icons is a stupid bad idea. Humans distinguish different objects by shape and color. Now when all objects are mandatory made to have same shape, it onl

Adaptive icons is a stupid bad idea. Humans distinguish different objects by shape and color. Now when all objects are mandatory made to have same shape, it only made harder to find needed icon. It effectively just made icons smaller and harder to distinguish from one another. Best Android icons were in Android 5.0, and went downhill from that.

sfRattan 8y ago
When I picked up a new phone last fall, this change made me irrationally angry. Now everything looks like a little piece of candy and not like an icon. Designs proceed further and further toward abstraction to the point that, without a lot of contextual knowledge, it can be hard to tell what they represent or if they even represent anything. Maybe I'm just being curmudgeonly, but I think icon design went downhill in about the mid-nineties. Classic Mac OS and Windows 95 haven't really been bested in terms of icon design clarity... and don't get me started about the loss of the Classic Mac OS Finder and its purely spatial metaphor. Not all design work is progress.