7 ms·

I am sorry but I am going to be that guy. Iconography has regressed so much, it's all the same optically to me. Designers keep pushing minimalism and line-graph

I am sorry but I am going to be that guy. Iconography has regressed so much, it's all the same optically to me. Designers keep pushing minimalism and line-graphics to "reduce crud" like its some sort of a religion. We can't distinguish icons well. There is no effort put into making them more unique and recognizable. What a horrible cult. Check out these glorious past remnants that we've forgotten about, they were so uhhh iconic : http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/ http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/ We love to see someone take Fam Fam Fam icons and create SVG versions of them. Iconography takes time and effort and enormous amount of patience, skill. You can't do this in a week in illustrator which is how it seems most icons are designed today. We've become lazy, want free stuff and no one is incentivized to spend 2 years creating amazing icons. The market for paid icons doesn't exist and we've done this to ourselves because we're addicted to free stuff. Google services icons? All impossible to tell apart now. Apple macOS dock? They use to be different shapes and sizes, now they are all chicklet squares in macOS Big Sur. Apple fired the guy (Forstall) that was the brilliant mind behind Apple's approach to UI way back in 2013. Since then, Apple UI design sucks. It is all getting worse, day by day, icon by icon. Iconography was a discipline people took seriously before 2010's. Windows 95, 98, XP icons were so amazing. They thought deeply about it. No one gives a shit anymore.

JKCalhoun 6y ago
Minimalism has a place — esp. with reduced screen real-estate. An icon I would display in my tool bar or on a button is different than an icon I would display on the desktop. My beef with Google's icons is the seeming random decision to use rounded miters on some art, sharp miters on others. Very mish-mash.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  > reduced screen real-estate Don't get me started on how much space we waste on any UI these days. Apart from HN UI, pretty much every website and desktop app has wastage of space. I suspect, we stopped using borders - thanks to minimalism, that we need to use copious amounts of negative space to separate them. So, now paddings and margins are liberally applied everywhere.
  - Xevi 6y ago
    Another reason is that we design websites for mobile users primarily, which requires more spacing due to touch input. And it's easy to just leave it in there for the desktop as well. It's also often more visually pleasing at first glance, even though it's less functional. I got to say that HN does not provide a nice mobile experience in my opinion. I've clicked the wrong link many times due to lack of white space. However I agree that a lot of sites add way too much spacing between everything.
  - duckmysick 6y ago
    > Apart from HN UI, pretty much every website and desktop app has wastage of space. By HN, do you mean Hacker News? Because it has whitespace on the sides (since the <table> element has width of 85%). It still looks fine if you change it to 90 or 95, so one could argue there's wasted space there too. But I'm not that one. I recognize empty space has its place in design. And it's not a fad either. Pick up a book - any book - and you will notice plenty of negative space there. Borders are used sparingly, if at all.
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      Books have a purpose for negative space on either side of the text. It's to allow you to hold it without obscuring the text. It is also to allow spine to be tightly bound. For reference, here is a good book that goes in-depth of what and whys of book design, it is hard to find it though: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Books-Practice-Jost-Hochuli/dp/0907259235 https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Books-Practice-Jost-Hochuli... Most negative space on the websites is merely designers going "it looks clean".
      - strokirk 6y ago
        What's wrong with a design being clean? Normally that's high praise!
      - duckmysick 6y ago
        It's not just for the practical purpose. Jan Tschichold writes: "Two constants reign over the proportions of a well made book: the hand and the eye." Indeed, large margins give a feeling of quality, luxury, and openness. Compare older books with spacious margins to tight ones in modern books so as much text can be crammed to save on printing. Here's another reference about page margins: https://practicaltypography.com/page-margins.html https://practicaltypography.com/page-margins.html "The pleasure of reading an effectively designed document will soon outweigh the unfamiliarity of extra white space around the edges."
crazygringo 6y ago
On the one hand, I absolutely agree with you. I tremendously lament the fact that outline, color, and shading have been thrown out so now we're trying to decipher little rounded-box hieroglyphics based on lines being subtly different. But on the other hand, the problem is that icons took so much work to create before, and also because they had such a recognizable identity/brand they weren't easy to reuse. Now the icons are so generic that they might as well be letters of the alphabet. They kinda are. A right-arrow is just a right-arrow -- it's not a Microsoft Office style right-arrow, or Windows 95 style right-arrow, or Mac Aqua style right-arrow, etc. These icon fonts make sense for when the icon is meant to be essentially decorative typography -- e.g. a share icon next to the word "share" or an "opens in new tab" link arrow. They work very well for websites. However, I hate these icon fonts when they're used without a text label besides them -- specifically in toolbars. That's where I wish desperately we could go back to colorful textured icons that were easy to tell apart. Even after years, I still find Gmail's toolbar of monochrome blob icons to be entirely unusable for this reason.
- bckygldstn 6y ago
  FYI there is a setting in gmail that turns the mystery icons into text labels: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2473038?hl=en-GB https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2473038?hl=en-GB
  - micdr0p 6y ago
    Thank you for this!
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Wow it never even occurred to me there would be a setting for that. Thanks!!
  - vintagedave 6y ago
    Bizarrely, it changes the buttons to text _only_. Not a glyph plus caption. A glyph plus text is more recognisable and explanatory than either.
- 6y ago
dangwu 6y ago
You seem to be confusing these Google Font icons with app icons (Google services, macOS dock icons). The former are meant to be simple, resizeable, used by other apps, work in dark/light mode, and able to be part of any design language. Compare them with Apple's SF Symbols.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Not an expert in this. In some fundamental way, icons have a specific function. To convey action, or status, etc in a small compact graphical form. Semiologically, photoshop tools palette icons and app icons are functionally the same. They are both used to perform an action whether that’s to select a tool or launch an app. Edit: one key thing I forgot about iconography - familiarity. The floppy disk icon is ubiquitously understood for historic reasons.
jwr 6y ago
I think most UI and industrial design has regressed a lot in recent years. Two big issues are: 1. Obsession with "minimalism" and "clean design". Taken to the extreme by Jony Ive, where we started fearing what else Apple would take away in new revisions of their hardware and software. Scrollbars disappeared, buttons started blending into the background or becoming invisible, everything was "clean", utterly undiscoverable, and annoying to use. It only looked good in the keynote demo. 2. Fashion. Designers love following other designers and fashion trends run rampant. That's why on our phones we are beginning to get a bunch of icons that all look the same, every one is an abstract geometric pattern using at least 4 saturated colors. And we can't tell them from one another. I am so hoping for a reversion of both trends. You don't have to design like everybody else!
deckard1 6y ago
> Google services icons? All impossible to tell apart now. Google went for maximum idiocy when they tried to use logos to serve two distinct roles: branding and utility. Which is why they look like complete unreadable ass. They forgot the simple fact that if you want branding, logos must look unique. And if you want utility, icons must be representative. It's a classic case of wanting impossible design. I suspect there were no actual designers involved in the top-level direction at all. I've certainly done worse things for a paycheck.
- ridaj 6y ago
  Seems like they went with branding at the expense of utility. Not sure they were trying to do both.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > when they tried to use logos to serve two distinct roles: branding and utility. But you can do this. MS Office has done so one way or another for decades - the icons in the product family have similar, distinctive design language, but each also clearly conveys which product it is with shape, colour, and a clear letter logo.
legitster 6y ago
I'm going to disagree. I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones), as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!). I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meaning into the layout and flow of the application. You actually have to pick out a nice, meaningful spot to put the button, and make sure it makes sense in the context, and make sure users can discover it easily. Compare that to an open source application that just throws a bright green plus sign at the end of a row of icons and expects you to know what it does.
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones),... I don't think anyone's disputing that you can do colorful icons poorly, but that's not an argument against them as a concept. > ...as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!). One of the cardinal sins of modern UX is fixing things that aren't broken, often just as you were getting used to the last "fix." > I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meaning into the layout and flow of the application. You actually have to pick out a nice, meaningful spot to put the button, and make sure it makes sense in the context, and make sure users can discover it easily. Nothing's stopping a designer from doing that with colorful icons. I think the real reason for flat, monochrome icons is designers prioritizing the overall visual look/style of an application over its usability. It's almost like a less extreme version of designing a "computer interface" for a movie.
  - legitster 6y ago
    I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like. I'm currently dealing with software that uses old style icons and menus and users just thoroughly do not understand the interfaces. The problem is that when every icon is brightly colored and bold, none of them are meaningful to the user. They all look equally important even when not. We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to!
marcosdumay 6y ago
Ok, your comment made me open the site instead of just taking a glance at the comments and moving on. When I got there, the icons were... actually not that bad. They have very diverse outlines (even more than your example), large features (again, more than your examples), and very precise meanings. Why do you say they are hard to tell apart? The only thing missing is color and gradients, but that is for good reason, as hard-coded colors do interfere with usability and accessibility, and currently we have no way to encode color independent gradients (that's a huge oversight, by the way).
SebastianKra 6y ago
What is it with HN being so hostile towards design? So many smart designers are carefully considering how to make genuinely ideal interfaces. But fuck them, they're just too lazy to put effort into complex interfaces, they're just following trends. They don't know what there doing. But Winamp-Themes where you can barely even see the buttons - yes, those are great. Sure, mistakes are made, and overcorrections happen. Everyone was tired of skeuomorphism a while ago (ironically, OP seems to have forgotten that). The response was a vast overcorrection and we're still recovering from that. But if you honestly think that we're off worse now, then I can only shake my head. (EDIT) But why is this hostility so prevalent in the developer demographic? Apparentlyy everyone else is okay. (unless you want to argue that there is some secret designer cult that imposes their will on everyone). Is it age? Are we just damaged from looking at a terminal too much?
- erulabs 6y ago
  It's sort of the default state of assumption about the world in my opinion. "Everyone is an idiot except me" makes the world incredibly simple - frustrating, but simple. "Other people are incredibly bright and talented" is a scarier thought at a first look, plus it's vastly more complex because then the second question: "Why are there still problems in the world" arises instantly. Personally I think it's wildly comforting and explanatory to assume other people (typically) know better than I do. Means I can focus on my little corner of the world and I don't need to tear it all down and rebuild it. Design, fashion, modern art; there are loads of domains engineers tend to assume are full of idiots - and yet we don't seem to dominate them like you'd assume we would if they were, indeed, full of idiots.
ashneo76 6y ago
I am going to heavily agree. The current set of useless garbage is not different from the next. And any and all creativeness is sirens in copying and being like apple and google. The flat abstractions are garbage that only a selected few understand. Instead of being a language that is representative of something, literally the meaning of "icon", it is a flat 2d projections of a 3d shape in a 2 color scheme. A floppy disk became the icon for saving because it represented "write to disk". Now, it would be a square in the name of flat ness and easy to read or some other optimization. This is not to be conflated with survivorship bias.

JKCalhoun 6y ago

Minimalism has a place — esp. with reduced screen real-estate. An icon I would display in my tool bar or on a button is different than an icon I would display on the desktop. My beef with Google's icons is the seeming random decision to use rounded miters on some art, sharp miters on others. Very mish-mash.

systemvoltage 6y ago
> reduced screen real-estate Don't get me started on how much space we waste on any UI these days. Apart from HN UI, pretty much every website and desktop app has wastage of space. I suspect, we stopped using borders - thanks to minimalism, that we need to use copious amounts of negative space to separate them. So, now paddings and margins are liberally applied everywhere.
- Xevi 6y ago
  Another reason is that we design websites for mobile users primarily, which requires more spacing due to touch input. And it's easy to just leave it in there for the desktop as well. It's also often more visually pleasing at first glance, even though it's less functional. I got to say that HN does not provide a nice mobile experience in my opinion. I've clicked the wrong link many times due to lack of white space. However I agree that a lot of sites add way too much spacing between everything.
- duckmysick 6y ago
  > Apart from HN UI, pretty much every website and desktop app has wastage of space. By HN, do you mean Hacker News? Because it has whitespace on the sides (since the <table> element has width of 85%). It still looks fine if you change it to 90 or 95, so one could argue there's wasted space there too. But I'm not that one. I recognize empty space has its place in design. And it's not a fad either. Pick up a book - any book - and you will notice plenty of negative space there. Borders are used sparingly, if at all.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Books have a purpose for negative space on either side of the text. It's to allow you to hold it without obscuring the text. It is also to allow spine to be tightly bound. For reference, here is a good book that goes in-depth of what and whys of book design, it is hard to find it though: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Books-Practice-Jost-Hochuli/dp/0907259235 https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Books-Practice-Jost-Hochuli... Most negative space on the websites is merely designers going "it looks clean".
    - strokirk 6y ago
      What's wrong with a design being clean? Normally that's high praise!
    - duckmysick 6y ago
      It's not just for the practical purpose. Jan Tschichold writes: "Two constants reign over the proportions of a well made book: the hand and the eye." Indeed, large margins give a feeling of quality, luxury, and openness. Compare older books with spacious margins to tight ones in modern books so as much text can be crammed to save on printing. Here's another reference about page margins: https://practicaltypography.com/page-margins.html https://practicaltypography.com/page-margins.html "The pleasure of reading an effectively designed document will soon outweigh the unfamiliarity of extra white space around the edges."

crazygringo 6y ago

On the one hand, I absolutely agree with you. I tremendously lament the fact that outline, color, and shading have been thrown out so now we're trying to decipher little rounded-box hieroglyphics based on lines being subtly different. But on the other hand, the problem is that icons took so much work to create before, and also because they had such a recognizable identity/brand they weren't easy to reuse. Now the icons are so generic that they might as well be letters of the alphabet. They kinda are. A right-arrow is just a right-arrow -- it's not a Microsoft Office style right-arrow, or Windows 95 style right-arrow, or Mac Aqua style right-arrow, etc. These icon fonts make sense for when the icon is meant to be essentially decorative typography -- e.g. a share icon next to the word "share" or an "opens in new tab" link arrow. They work very well for websites. However, I hate these icon fonts when they're used without a text label besides them -- specifically in toolbars. That's where I wish desperately we could go back to colorful textured icons that were easy to tell apart. Even after years, I still find Gmail's toolbar of monochrome blob icons to be entirely unusable for this reason.

bckygldstn 6y ago
FYI there is a setting in gmail that turns the mystery icons into text labels: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2473038?hl=en-GB https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2473038?hl=en-GB
- micdr0p 6y ago
  Thank you for this!
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Wow it never even occurred to me there would be a setting for that. Thanks!!
- vintagedave 6y ago
  Bizarrely, it changes the buttons to text _only_. Not a glyph plus caption. A glyph plus text is more recognisable and explanatory than either.
6y ago

dangwu 6y ago

You seem to be confusing these Google Font icons with app icons (Google services, macOS dock icons). The former are meant to be simple, resizeable, used by other apps, work in dark/light mode, and able to be part of any design language. Compare them with Apple's SF Symbols.

systemvoltage 6y ago
Not an expert in this. In some fundamental way, icons have a specific function. To convey action, or status, etc in a small compact graphical form. Semiologically, photoshop tools palette icons and app icons are functionally the same. They are both used to perform an action whether that’s to select a tool or launch an app. Edit: one key thing I forgot about iconography - familiarity. The floppy disk icon is ubiquitously understood for historic reasons.

jwr 6y ago

I think most UI and industrial design has regressed a lot in recent years. Two big issues are: 1. Obsession with "minimalism" and "clean design". Taken to the extreme by Jony Ive, where we started fearing what else Apple would take away in new revisions of their hardware and software. Scrollbars disappeared, buttons started blending into the background or becoming invisible, everything was "clean", utterly undiscoverable, and annoying to use. It only looked good in the keynote demo. 2. Fashion. Designers love following other designers and fashion trends run rampant. That's why on our phones we are beginning to get a bunch of icons that all look the same, every one is an abstract geometric pattern using at least 4 saturated colors. And we can't tell them from one another. I am so hoping for a reversion of both trends. You don't have to design like everybody else!

deckard1 6y ago

> Google services icons? All impossible to tell apart now. Google went for maximum idiocy when they tried to use logos to serve two distinct roles: branding and utility. Which is why they look like complete unreadable ass. They forgot the simple fact that if you want branding, logos must look unique. And if you want utility, icons must be representative. It's a classic case of wanting impossible design. I suspect there were no actual designers involved in the top-level direction at all. I've certainly done worse things for a paycheck.

ridaj 6y ago
Seems like they went with branding at the expense of utility. Not sure they were trying to do both.
core-questions 6y ago
> when they tried to use logos to serve two distinct roles: branding and utility. But you can do this. MS Office has done so one way or another for decades - the icons in the product family have similar, distinctive design language, but each also clearly conveys which product it is with shape, colour, and a clear letter logo.

legitster 6y ago

I'm going to disagree. I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones), as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!). I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meaning into the layout and flow of the application. You actually have to pick out a nice, meaningful spot to put the button, and make sure it makes sense in the context, and make sure users can discover it easily. Compare that to an open source application that just throws a bright green plus sign at the end of a row of icons and expects you to know what it does.

tablespoon 6y ago
> I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones),... I don't think anyone's disputing that you can do colorful icons poorly, but that's not an argument against them as a concept. > ...as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!). One of the cardinal sins of modern UX is fixing things that aren't broken, often just as you were getting used to the last "fix." > I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meaning into the layout and flow of the application. You actually have to pick out a nice, meaningful spot to put the button, and make sure it makes sense in the context, and make sure users can discover it easily. Nothing's stopping a designer from doing that with colorful icons. I think the real reason for flat, monochrome icons is designers prioritizing the overall visual look/style of an application over its usability. It's almost like a less extreme version of designing a "computer interface" for a movie.
- legitster 6y ago
  I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like. I'm currently dealing with software that uses old style icons and menus and users just thoroughly do not understand the interfaces. The problem is that when every icon is brightly colored and bold, none of them are meaningful to the user. They all look equally important even when not. We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to!

marcosdumay 6y ago

Ok, your comment made me open the site instead of just taking a glance at the comments and moving on. When I got there, the icons were... actually not that bad. They have very diverse outlines (even more than your example), large features (again, more than your examples), and very precise meanings. Why do you say they are hard to tell apart? The only thing missing is color and gradients, but that is for good reason, as hard-coded colors do interfere with usability and accessibility, and currently we have no way to encode color independent gradients (that's a huge oversight, by the way).

SebastianKra 6y ago

What is it with HN being so hostile towards design? So many smart designers are carefully considering how to make genuinely ideal interfaces. But fuck them, they're just too lazy to put effort into complex interfaces, they're just following trends. They don't know what there doing. But Winamp-Themes where you can barely even see the buttons - yes, those are great. Sure, mistakes are made, and overcorrections happen. Everyone was tired of skeuomorphism a while ago (ironically, OP seems to have forgotten that). The response was a vast overcorrection and we're still recovering from that. But if you honestly think that we're off worse now, then I can only shake my head. (EDIT) But why is this hostility so prevalent in the developer demographic? Apparentlyy everyone else is okay. (unless you want to argue that there is some secret designer cult that imposes their will on everyone). Is it age? Are we just damaged from looking at a terminal too much?

erulabs 6y ago
It's sort of the default state of assumption about the world in my opinion. "Everyone is an idiot except me" makes the world incredibly simple - frustrating, but simple. "Other people are incredibly bright and talented" is a scarier thought at a first look, plus it's vastly more complex because then the second question: "Why are there still problems in the world" arises instantly. Personally I think it's wildly comforting and explanatory to assume other people (typically) know better than I do. Means I can focus on my little corner of the world and I don't need to tear it all down and rebuild it. Design, fashion, modern art; there are loads of domains engineers tend to assume are full of idiots - and yet we don't seem to dominate them like you'd assume we would if they were, indeed, full of idiots.

ashneo76 6y ago

I am going to heavily agree. The current set of useless garbage is not different from the next. And any and all creativeness is sirens in copying and being like apple and google. The flat abstractions are garbage that only a selected few understand. Instead of being a language that is representative of something, literally the meaning of "icon", it is a flat 2d projections of a 3d shape in a 2 color scheme. A floppy disk became the icon for saving because it represented "write to disk". Now, it would be a square in the name of flat ness and easy to read or some other optimization. This is not to be conflated with survivorship bias.