17 ms·

Windows 98 icons are great (2015)

312 points by chungy 4y ago

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Nostalgia yes. And also utility. Icons have to scale both now and back then. Yet back then you had to draw pixel at a time or it looked like mud. Now you can downsample and most will never see anything smaller than 128x128. Still sucks for users if they only see it rendered at half that size for menu or a reduced size taskbar. Or if it relies on color contrast without consideration for color blindness. Some designers aren't thoughtful enough to check.
canaIGGERa 4y ago
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canaIGGERa 4y ago
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pocketarc 4y ago
I sometimes wonder what would've happened if the UI itself hadn't changed much; if Windows had retained those icons, that style, those ways of doing things. What if we had the Windows 95/98 look but with the benefit of 20+ years of polish and refinement? Not saying I think their UI is perfect, but perhaps we'd see people feel a lot more familiar/comfortable with their computers, and perhaps it would also have inspired future generations not to constantly redesign things. Just as Apple became an inspiration for designers; it could have been the other side of that coin. It's fun to think about.
- suprjami 4y ago
  Not the exact icons, but the usage pattern is still alive and well with the Cinnamon and MATE desktops (the latter with the Redmond preset iirc). I won't use anything else.
  - oso2k 4y ago
    Also, you can write Win32 apps on Linux with Nano-X/Microwindows. http://www.microwindows.org/ http://www.microwindows.org/
    - anthk 4y ago
      Just use WineLib.
- panzi 4y ago
  They need to make the dialogs resizeable, though. Those tiny dialogs where you have to scroll basically in the eye of a needle are ridiculous.
- kyleee 4y ago
  Fun and a bit sad to think about from some angles. For instance the often maligned baby boomer generation essentially had the UI/UX rug from pulled from underneath them leading to loss of confidence and computer skill regression. Not to mention probably opened them up further to fishing and other computer scams due to a combination of UI churn, generally being flustered by changing conventions, etc. Not to pin all their computing woes on this, but I think it’s had a large negative effect
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Multiple times, at that. I remember buying the very first iPad for my mom. One thing that she really liked was that huge, prominent physical button that you could press to immediately go to the home screen. No matter which app she ended up in and how confusing it was, the safe place was always there within easy reach. It made her that much more confident to actually go and explore. Now, she's supposed to slide from the bottom edge, I suppose. Except if you don't do it vigorously enough, it doesn't actually bring you home. But, hey, the gadget is now 15mm shorter!
- nektro 4y ago
  https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
wildrhythms 4y ago
How the hell did we regress from these immediately recognizable works of art to what we have today: uninspired, barely discernable hieroglyphs? See Material icons, Bootstrap icons, Font Awesome... all boring as hell, and for how many N millions of dollars these corporations spend on artists and graphic designers and UX designers they still can't seem to break out of this tired trend. "Ah but hieroglyph icons of today scale better!" Well, hieroglyph icons of today scale consistently, but remember the icon designers back in the day would make different sizes of each icon to be clearly recognizable at all scales (the whole point of the .ico format!), and to me that is way better than what we have now.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I fully agree. I’ll throw out a thought: they don’t translate well into the higher resolutions. Actually I doubt this. But the very simple, dumb icons probably scale more cleanly.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Part of it probably has to do with how sterile modern hieroglyphs are. Look at those Windows 3.1/95/98/ME/2K/XP/Vista/7 icons: They have character. You try and tell me they didn't have fun drawing the icons for MS Agent and Dr. Watson; the fun and sense of humor the devs and artists had making them just ooze out. Modern day hieroglyphs? They aim to not confuse or offend anyone, and end up impressing noone. They aim to speak all languages and end up speaking nothing. They aim to inform everyone and end up informing noone.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kyleee 4y ago
    I have to concur. I find that I am somewhat icon blind these days and can scan over an icon/app that I am looking for multiple times in certain instances before finding it
  - delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
causality0 4y ago
One fundamental concept we've given up is "what you see is what you get". Open up a window from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 7 and things that behave different look different. The part of the window "inside" and the part of the window border you can click and drag to resize or move around are two different colors. The minimize, maximize, and close buttons are a different color from the part of the title bar you can click to move the window around. Not so anymore. The "close" button is now a visible X and an invisible rectangle around the X. The drag-able border of the window is an invisible radius surrounding the edge of a window. I hope the executive responsible for this rots in hell.
- zxcvbnm 4y ago
  Exactly. Eg. at some point Ubuntu (true also for Win) decided no proper borders around windows and giant title bars. Now I always struggle findig the border, to grab, between two partially overlapping black terminal windows. And wasting screen realestate on title bars and margins just bugs the hell out of me. I've spent hours trying to fix these things, gave up in the end, there was always something that didn't work right. Why did the world forget doing reasonable defaults that just work without tweaking. Oh and don't get me started on disappearing scrollbars, and lazy loading ui components, which reorder what's under focus/mouse/finger every half a second, and make me do a wrong click if I'm in a hurry
  - anthk 4y ago
    Scrollbar fix: edit /etc/profile.d/gtk.sh, add this: #!/bin/sh export GTK_NO_OVERLAY=1 Chmod +x it. On theming: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 It works best with Ubuntu Mate. With Ubuntu Gnome it will work but not so integrated.
  - bmacho 4y ago
    > Exactly. Eg. at some point Ubuntu (true also for Win) decided no proper borders around windows and giant title bars. Now I always struggle findig the border, to grab, between two partially overlapping black terminal windows. Try setting up alt + right click, or windows + right click to resize the windows. I have AltDrag installed on Windows, and I can grab my windows anywhere to move or resize.
whalesalad 4y ago
Personally, Win XP was the pinnacle of Windows. Everything has gone downhill since then.
- bluedino 4y ago
  As long as you turn off the Fisher Price interface
  - whalesalad 4y ago
    It’s my fav! Loved the media center ui too.
  - toast0 4y ago
    It wasn't so bad as long as you turned the window title height down to normal. Then it was nice because you wouldn't prick your finger on sharp edges anymore. Out of the box, the extra window title height took up too much room, ugh. But then now there's so much whitespace everywhere.
- endgame 4y ago
  I call it the start of the decline, as it was the first version of Windows which featured on-line activation, legitimising the practice in the wider industry.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Microsoft online product activation was first introduced in Office 97, a few years before WinXP.
    - Hublium 4y ago
      Where do you have this information from? As far as I know, product activation for office started with Office XP ("2002").
      - int_19h 4y ago
sublinear 4y ago
All icons are confusing until they're burned into your memory. How confusing they are has more to do with the complexity of the operation they symbolize than the design of the icon itself. Naming is hard. Symbolizing is hard. Normalizing operations is not hard. I don't blame modern icons. I blame poor abstractions driven by marketing becoming the norm.
- jrockway 4y ago
  I'm waiting for designers to figure out some way to signify "save" without using a picture of a floppy disk. That was great back in the day, but I bet a large number of computer users have never seen a diskette.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    SD card shape would be a logical replacement today, I think.
    - warning26 4y ago
      Who is saving to an SD card these days? If we want to be really accurate, it would probably have to be a representation of a flash memory chip.
      - derefr 4y ago
        People who use cameras (dash cams, action cams, drone cameras), portable game consoles (by which I mean the Switch, yes, but also all those Shezhen "retro consoles"), and a few other things. People do still know what SD cards are, even if they don't have a slot for one on their flagship phone. Nevertheless, the real issue is more that "saving" isn't really something you do any more; almost all apps now autosave and restore on restart, such that the real action that needs an icon isn't "save"; it's the option you get when you indicate you'd like to close an open, but unnamed project/document without quitting the application: "give this project/document a name."
      - int_19h 4y ago
101008 4y ago
Oh, so beautiful and so nostalgic. I think I always associated unconsciously GIF with the green color, and JPEG with the red color. The explanation may be on these icons: JPG is the frame with a red painting, while GIF is the frame with the green painting. I remember using them as a kid a lot in the 2000s when designing my own webpages in Frontpage + Paint.
jdelman 4y ago
Cool browser. But, these icons were not meant to be rendered with the heavy anti-aliasing performed by today's web browsers and displays. There is now a CSS property `image-rendering` which you can set to `pixelated` to perform nearest-neighbor resizing. This looks great as long as you use a sensible whole-number multiple for the image dimensions. Try adding a `* {image-rendering: 'pixelated'}` in dev tools and you can see these icons in their true glory.
- layer8 4y ago
  They were meant to be rendered with the inherent anti-aliasing of a CRT screen. Pixelated rendering on a high-DPI screen will look quite different.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Color LCDs were common on Windows laptops in 1998, and decent CRTs in late 1990s were quite sharp. Pixelated rendering is closest to the design intent IMO.
alberth 4y ago
Windows 2000, to me, was the pinnacle. It had a number of refinements. Gallery of screenshots https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win2000advserv https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win2000advserv
- panzi 4y ago
  Agreed.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I’d love to know the story behind why CD player is so different. Gotta be cool?
  - p_l 4y ago
    1990s multimedia skeumorphism. Honestly, the cd player is quite understated there...
  - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
    it was made to look like a car streo i guess
  - LeoPanthera 4y ago
    It's from the Windows 98 Plus Pack. They didn't rewrite it for Windows 2000, they just used it as-is, so it retains the Windows 98 "Plus" look.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      Oh that old chestnut. Is 2000 filled with 98 and 95 UIs like modern times?
      - chungy 4y ago
        Yes, but 95+98+2000 were basically all of the same design philosophy, so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb when something was not changed from 95.
Waterluvian 4y ago
What came first? Apple’s trash or Windows’ recycle bin? I always assumed the latter because it feels like a “we need to be different but throw a tiny bit of shade while we’re at it.”
- cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  i think the concept originated with lisa
  - slater 4y ago
    Likely more with the Xerox stuff that Apple uhh... "improved upon"... https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-information-system/ https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-inf...
    - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
      It wouldn't suprise me if that was the case
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chriscjcj 4y ago
  To answer your specific question, Apple's Lisa was released on January 19, 1983. It had a waste basket. The Mac OS and its trash can debuted along with the original Macintosh computer on January 24, 1984. Windows introduced the recycle bin along with Windows 95 which was released on August 24, 1995.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Thanks! And yeah, it seems like this is part of the "ripping off Xerox" saga. Now I'm curious what Microsoft did Between 1984 and 1995. Time to go boot up Windows 3.1.
- Narishma 4y ago
panzi 4y ago
The icon gallery could use image-rendering: pixelated, though. For 4k and "retina" displays. Otherwise the browser upscales it with cubic interpolation and it will look blurry.
- layer8 4y ago
  It was blurry on CRT as well, though a different kind of blurry. It's difficult to reproduce the original look.
  - delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
    Reproducing CRT anti-aliasing on an LCD display requires a sufficiently high-density display and a shader applied to the text.
jiggawatts 4y ago
I'm a big fan of the SVG icons used in the Azure Portal. They're embedded directly into the HTML, so they're efficient. Their design is simple and looks good both at small sizes and scaled up. They have a fairly consistent color scheme and "design language", making them easily recognisable. You can download the SVG files separately and embed them in design documents, preserving the high-quality vector art format! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/ Compare these to the AWS icon set, which are just lines on a single-color square: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/ https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/
- albert_e 4y ago
  I have my own complaints with how AWS does their icons. however current icon set used by AWS is way better than the "3D" icons they had earlier I think having "lines on a square" can also be converted to SVG. In fact AWS page you linked does have an "Assets Package" download that included both PNG and SVG icons for both light and dark backgrounds. the "single-color square" is actually a gradient fill too -- whether that is better is subjective. I have always felt the need for an API that serves the correct icon in chosen resolution and format. we recently saw a HN post that argued that architecture diagrams should be code. this would be one necessary step towards that.
metadat 4y ago
Previous discussion from back in January 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18953542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18953542 (358 comments) Some good nuggets of timeless insights.
- userbinator 4y ago
  It's surprising how 2019 feels just like yesterday to me, yet that was already 4 years ago. In comparison, 1998 was 25 years ago, and that did feel like it was a long time.
  - metadat 4y ago
    The pandemic has frozen time in some ways. Time is strange enough already and the pando has compounded it.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    In 1998 MS had design. Now it is all crap.
berjin 4y ago
[flagged]
- farkanoid 4y ago
  Pregnant person!
  - hackmiester 4y ago
    Yes, there are all three.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Trans men exist. I mean it's kind of edge-casey to include in Unicode, because trans-man pregnancies aren't super common, but if you're going to do both genders for all the other things, makes sense for that too.
  - hackmiester 4y ago
    I am trans and I do feel that this is the most accurate take.
  - vvovo 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - danudey 4y ago
      Trans men are men, regardless of what bigots might try to convince people of.
      - vvovo 4y ago
        [flagged]
- afavour 4y ago
  Is there anything that isn’t immediately turned into a pointless culture war argument these days? This is an article about the design of Windows 98 icons. You’re complaining about two emojis in 2023. I really have to wonder about the thought process that sees “iconography” and immediately goes to “can you believe Apple made a pregnant man emoji?!?”. It’s exhausting.
boredemployee 4y ago
Things like that always catch me. I reflect about how many effort people put in the past and then they suddenly get replaced (and it doesnt mean it is for the better). The same to video games. Every year a new fifa, a new cod, etc. and lots of efforts and energy stay in the past. What was super exciting back then people dont even remember it existed today.
lamacase 4y ago
I dunno, I think a lot of early windows icons were kind of hard to differentiate at a glance. A lot of them are just computers or windows with different smaller icons on them. You can see this even in the examples shown from the collection. I generally agree that modern attempts to "unify" the design of icons usually go to far, but if you think Windows 98 icons are strictly better than say Windows 11 icons, that seems like rose coloured glasses to me. The good ones are good, but the bad ones are worse. Although I do understand the appeal, and subjectively I do like them better.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  As much as I am nostalgic, I agree with this. So many people here say how intuitive icons were, but which one of you can explain the meaning of the 5th icon on the first picture in the article, the one with an app window in front of a folder? I used Windows starting with 95, so it probably saw it many-many times. But now it is impossible to either remember or guess its meaning.
  - deadbeeves 4y ago
    It's the icon for the "Programs" submenu of the Start menu. It is somewhat cryptic, but I think it's difficult to communicate "here's where your installed programs can be accessed" graphically. I don't think the icon is used anywhere else, so it's not much of a problem. You'll never see it out of context without the accompanying text.
kypro 4y ago
It's genuinely hard for me to understand some of the UI/UX decisions made in the latest versions of Windows. Old versions of Windows seemed to be built in a intuitive way so even someone with no computer experience would have a chance at finding what they were looking for. Icons were designed to look like what they do. Things were labelled with text. The interface was predictable. Where as today everything just seems obscure and random... For one, we don't have a "start" button anymore, we have a four square thing which you're suppose to just know to click. If I want to get to the control panel I have to erm... Search for it on the four squared menu thing? I'm not even sure there is a "proper" way to navigate there anymore, instead you just need to know there is a thing called the "control panel" and search for it. And even then you're never 100% sure if you want the "control panel" or "settings". And why do these two interfaces have completely different UIs? It's like the whole OS is designed to be as confusing as possible. If I didn't have experience with prior versions of Windows I'm not sure I'd even know how to do the most basic things.
- batiudrami 4y ago
  There are issues with the modern windows user interface but I’m not sure it’s these. For one “start” was never actually how most people started using the computer - it is through desktop shortcuts, so the label didn’t really make sense. The control panel is depreciated and remains for compatibility reasons and is deliberately hidden in favour of the settings button, which uses the now familiar gear icon.
  - _gabe_ 4y ago
    > For one “start” was never actually how most people started using the computer - it is through desktop shortcuts This is just wrong haha. Here's a raymond chen post: > But one thing kept getting kicked up by usability tests: People booted up the computer and just sat there, unsure what to do next. > That’s when we decided to label the System button “Start”. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030722-00/?p=43083 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030722-00/?p=43... Edit: I hope this comment doesn't come off as rude or anything too :). I just remember reading about this in Raymond's book and the fact that the start menu originally didn't say start stuck out to me.
marcuskaz 4y ago
BeOS were my favorite. https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos
- ykonstant 4y ago
  Wow, those look amazing.
- drooopy 4y ago
  I'm fairly certain that if Apple kept on developing classic Mac OS, its icons would not look dissimilar to those.
vaygr 4y ago
It feels to me you had to be born at specific time to truly appreciate pixelart. I show it to my wife (who's just 5 years younger), and she's like: "No.".
- speedgoose 4y ago
  They aren’t very beautiful pixel art icons. Maybe a bit when seen through nostalgia glasses. They are well made though.
- thiht 4y ago
  I love pixel art, used Win 98 as my first OS and still find them ugly as hell. The colors are sad, the perspective is off, and on the first image[1], only 2 icons out of 6 make any sense to me (the trash and the folder). On the second image[2] I understand the wheelchair and the notepad but that's it. These icons aren't inherently easier to understand. [1]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/win98-icons-1.png https://alexmeub.com/assets/win98-icons-1.png [2]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/project-windows98-icons.png https://alexmeub.com/assets/project-windows98-icons.png
rqtwteye 4y ago
Years ago I tried to teach my dad how to work with Windows. He somehow wasn't capable of seeing the window borders and which window was in front. Also didn't see buttons. Recently I have noticed that I am also beginning to struggle seeing the window borders in Windows 10. If design trends continue I may also soon be unable to operate my laptop :-(. I appreciate that MacOS hasn't gone as crazy as Window.
- doubled112 4y ago
  Windows doesn't render drop shadows in an RDP session, and I've had a few times where I clicked the wrong window because there is no border.
- hulitu 4y ago
  In old windows (95, 98, 2000) it was pretty clear which window has focus and which don't. In Win 10 is a mess.
markwong 4y ago
Imho, the BeOS icons are better than Win9x icons.
helf 4y ago
UIs these days have terrible icons and amazing amounts of wasted screen space. I don’t get it. Everything is so sterile and “modern” as others have mentioned.
sergiotapia 4y ago
Just look at the top right icon in the first image. Two computers connected by a pipe of sorts. The computers are two different colors, immediately telling you they are two separate entities (not a clone). The pipe has a bright yellow notch. Just perfection, damn! I wonder where the team is now and what they're designing. Anyone know?
munificent 4y ago
You never forget your first love. I always felt like the Win98 icons were subpar because they didn't have a consistent perspective and the shading was unnecessary and not very well done. Everything is shaped like flat surfaces but shaded as if it's rounded and bulge-y. The Mac System 7 icons were what made me fall in love with icon design. There are so crisp and legible, and create a consistent metaphor and perspective that spans the entire desktop and glues it together. And they still manage to have a little charm and warmth.
- FatActor 4y ago
  I remember reading someone (Steve Albini?) who said, paraphrased, "Your musical tastes as an adult were defined when you were 14."
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    I don't know if that's true. I don't listen to anything remotely simlar to what I listened to as 14.
    - matwood 4y ago
      Same. Maybe genres are roughly set, but for me that wasn't even true. I didn't start to get a deep appreciation for classical music until my 20s. I think the popularity of music streaming services has made it so easy to try and find new (new to them) music, that people continue to discover forever now.
    - FatActor 4y ago
      It is common in English to make statements like this that are attempting to assert a general hypothesis, and are not expected to pedantically account for every individual human being.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  > Everything is shaped like flat surfaces but shaded as if it's rounded and bulge-y. but that's the best part!!
zmmmmm 4y ago
I really do think functional UI design peaked somewhere in the early to mid 2000's. Right after that people started speaking of skeumorphism as a pejorative and that meant anything that looked 3d in any sense or resembled any kind of real world object had to be scrubbed out. If you could tell what something did, that by definition meant it was old fashioned! And the UI frameworks at the time almost made it hard to build something where there was a UI action without a corresponding menu item and shortcut key. You could bring up the menus like a site map of the application to see everything it could do (site maps - another relic of the 2000's!).
- leonidasv 4y ago
  I still see people confused about sandwich menus. They don't recognise those 3 stacked lines as a menu button. I think I only recognise it immediately because I was involved with Web development when that thing came along, but to this day I always end up having to help someone, even tech people, finding some menu when browsing the web together.
  - toyg 4y ago
    Yeah, "hamburger menus" are the modern equivalent of right-click: very useful once you understand it, but very difficult for the general population to get to grip with.
    - layer8 4y ago
      Hamburger menus are not really the equivalent of right-click context menus, because they aren't contextual to elements on the screen. Long press would be the equivalent of right click, but it isn't used very much.
- pcurve 4y ago
  Agreed. Once you give something a label, it takes on life of its own. I think the sound of the word "skeumorphism" probably didn't help either.
leke 4y ago
I also have fond memories of the Windows 3.1 icons. I loved the old layout of the windows OS. If I was any good at Linux, I would make a distro/desktop behave exactly like 98.
_8j50 4y ago
The middle two and bottom right of the first pic make no sense to me. I don't get this nostalgia. One of my first C projects was a failed attempt at using opengl to do a 3d desktop environment. Still frustrated at how archaic the desktop and webui is. The future is held hostage by the past.
29athrowaway 4y ago
OS/2, BeOS, MacOS 8, Amiga and KDE 2 icons were great too. Then you've got Irix icons, and probably on the last place, Solaris CDE.
- Underphil 4y ago
  'Amiga' is a pretty broad brush. Which ones in particular?
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Amiga Workbench icons.
- hulitu 4y ago
  CDE is ok.
nunez 4y ago
Feels really nostalgic. I was definitely around when all we had were 32x32 ICOs and "Windows Classic" (RIP). All of these look old as hell now. What's interesting is that while Windows 2000 is completely unrecognizable from Windows 11 (mmc, winver, and devmgmt.msc aside), OS X Jaguar looks and feels the same as macOS Ventura (System Prefs aside), just way more skeumorphic. Same with iOS (it basically hasn't changed since iOS 7). I think that's a testament to how insanely talented the designers at Apple are/were.
- ihatepython 4y ago
  In my opinion, iOS 5 was the peak for iOS, iOS 7 is where everything went off the rails. Present-day iOS has a notch, a screen with rounded corners, no home button, and endless places on the screen that are swipe-able. Haven't used OS X since Mojave, but compared to Jaguar, there are no scrollbars, the interface is designed more for a trackpad instead of a mouse. The peak for OS X in my opinion was the Panther/Tiger/Snow Leopard era.
  - leokennis 4y ago
    While I agree current day iOS is overcomplicated with too much white space and mystery interactions, one thing I do not miss is the home button. The gestures to go back to the Home Screen and to switch apps work extremely well and intuitively.
axiolite 4y ago
Windows NT4.0 icons were the best: https://winuxinfocenter.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/desktop-1.png https://winuxinfocenter.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/deskto... Why 98? Same icons on 95 were they not? No argument that the Windows UI has gone massively downhill with each successive release. But hey, if they make it complicated enough, needing to add/remove programs in 3-4 different places, maybe you'll search for everything with Cortana and then they can track and guide you into their own services.
- treve 4y ago
  I don't remember the gradients. Was that a later update?
- toyg 4y ago
  > Why 98? Same icons on 95 were they not? No. Iirc 98 have more colors and better resolutions.
- thomasz 4y ago
  That is just nostalgia. There is something to be said about the icon design, but you really wouldn’t want the II of that era back. Nowadays you start an application by clicking a fixed location in the task bar or by pressing the windows key and typing the first two or three letters. Back than, you had to navigate a ridiculous start menu tree. Windows didn’t snap to the borders, task bar entries would move around. There was no search beyond the file system, so you either needed a ton of luck, a ton of time or a superhuman memory to change some obscure settings.
  - Hublium 4y ago
    Press <Windows>+R, "calc" <Return>. Easy and fast, if you can remember the exact names of the executables. Also, back then Windows came not only with printed manuals, but also with an actually useful help system and not one that just makes a Bing search.
    - pedrogpimenta 4y ago
alkonaut 4y ago
I don't care if it feels like a place to get real work done or not. Whether I do get real work done matters of course, but I want it to look like a really nicely designed space too. And by nice design I mean beautiful to look at, not merely "designed to get work done" in the industrial design sense. Just like working in an office effectively shouldn't mean it has to be decorated with complete utilitarianism at every turn, nor should by screen. Am I strange to tend to like app and OS redesigns if they make things look fresh, even when they might slow me down slightly, or even slow my machine down? I just wanted to be the contrarian voice here. Redesign all you want. It's ok to say "Let's choose just a little bit of form over function here". I usually like the new better than the old. No, Win2000 wasn't the pinnacle of Windows neither in function nor design. There I said it.
- cuddlyogre 4y ago
  The occasional refresh is expected. Revamping the UI every two years is not. It makes it impossible to do anything other than watch youtube. Supporting a network with a mixture of OSs that kind of match but not really is an exercise in frustration.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago
  The problem is that it's gone too far to the other side, aesthetics with little respect for function. It's akin to that office that has no desk because it would ruin the aesthetics. The desk has to be there, your challenge is (should be) to design around the functional requirements.
  - atoav 4y ago
    Good designers try to reach a good solution where multiple (seemingly opposed to each other) requirements are covered in such a way, they enhance each other's qualities. That being said, designers work with customers and as a former freelance designer I can tell you that wrangling the customer is basically half the job. This is true even in a company setting. Design is one of those fields where everybody thinks they know what works and everybody thinks they have taste (spoiler alert: they don't). I ultimately stopped working in the field because you literally had to manipulate customers into making okay choices instead of horrible ones and even then you had the occasional CEO just overriding weeks of work with some bullshit idea he had on the shitter. Everybody blames designers, but designers rarely make the choices that lead to the results everybody sees. Designers just try to get paid.
Annatar 4y ago
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guerrilla 4y ago
Yeah they aren't too bad, but I still think the BeOS ones were better [1] 1. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=beos+icons&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=beos+icons&iax=images&ia=im...
qwerty456127 4y ago
An icon pack which included many icons in this style came with VisualStudio/WindowsSDK. MS Office 2003 toolbar icons also are worth extracting. By the way, Windows 98 icons are Number-Two for me, the real Number-One top were Windows 3.11 icons.
mcv 4y ago
I've always felt they were hideous, but I guess that's a matter of taste. They certainly are consistent, functional and clear, and that's the important part.
guidedlight 4y ago
I believe most of these icons are embedded in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\shell32.dll file. Also check out C:\WINDOWS\system32\moricons.dll for even older icons.
ilyt 4y ago
Meanwhile Google ones get worse and worse. I don't think old MS ones look nice but they are instantly recognizable (and really, most stuff from those times. Nowadays we're getting weird trend to either monochromatize or outright abstract icons that can't be easily associated with a thing. When we had 256 colors and tiny amount of pixels developers used every single one of them, now we have millions and get colorful squares
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Yep... This picture says it all: https://i.imgur.com/jaXMYHr.png https://i.imgur.com/jaXMYHr.png I also hate the minimalism of small greyish singe-color outline icons, where everything looks the same, and you don't know what it does... a grey square? A stop button? Oh no, it shows the list of already open apps... circle with an outline? Yep, everybody thinks "home" (button) when they see a circle... etc.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > Meanwhile Google ones get worse and worse And Microsoft copies from Google. What can be worse than that ?
meerita 4y ago
Nothing beats Mac OS 9 icons. They were just in another league.
- anthk 4y ago
  Check OSX' grandaddy icons: the NextStep/GNUStep ones.
  - meerita 4y ago
    Yeah, I had the chance to use most of the oldest OS's, I would say Mac OS 8 to 9 are the best icons that I found best, of course Win 95 was sweet, I really loved their work.
sbaiddn 4y ago
Windows 2000 was the best MS OS IMHO. Looked just like win98, but was from their NT line.
- matwood 4y ago
  I agree, but I may be biased. Windows 2000 was the last Windows I used for any significant amount of time.
nirav72 4y ago
I love the win98 icons. But that teal background was something i found just fugly.
- hulitu 4y ago
  When i saw it on a Tektronix monitor, i was enlighted.
cm2187 4y ago
Unfortunately function lost to form. All icons are grey now. The biggest problem I have with Windows is borderless windows, where if you have a white window over another white window, 1) there is no way to tell where it ends, 2) if you want to grab the edge to resize it your mouse must be precise to the exact pixel, which is even harder when you are dealing with citrix remote desktop. But I guess the most important thing is that it doesn't offend its designer's taste. I will try to resize those damn things again and again.
hifix 4y ago
There's a lot of rose-tinted glasses in this thread and this is coming from someone who grew up using computers with these sorts of icons and designs. I appreciate the aesthetic, but I still think that many of them are too difficult to distinguish on their own, regardless of whether they're in full-colour skeuomorphic or a flat line icon. As another commenter pointed out, a lot of them are just variations of a computer / folder / paper with other icons stacked on them in different ways or sizes. In any case, you would want a supporting label to really convey the meaning. While I love to see these sorts of icons in personal sites and projects, the reality is that if I presented icons like these to a client for a SaaS app in 2023, I'd be sent back to the drawing board. No serious business wants their UI to look like it just stepped out of the 90's.

312 points by chungy 4y ago

Nostalgia yes. And also utility. Icons have to scale both now and back then. Yet back then you had to draw pixel at a time or it looked like mud. Now you can downsample and most will never see anything smaller than 128x128. Still sucks for users if they only see it rendered at half that size for menu or a reduced size taskbar. Or if it relies on color contrast without consideration for color blindness. Some designers aren't thoughtful enough to check.

canaIGGERa 4y ago

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canaIGGERa 4y ago

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pocketarc 4y ago

I sometimes wonder what would've happened if the UI itself hadn't changed much; if Windows had retained those icons, that style, those ways of doing things. What if we had the Windows 95/98 look but with the benefit of 20+ years of polish and refinement? Not saying I think their UI is perfect, but perhaps we'd see people feel a lot more familiar/comfortable with their computers, and perhaps it would also have inspired future generations not to constantly redesign things. Just as Apple became an inspiration for designers; it could have been the other side of that coin. It's fun to think about.

suprjami 4y ago
Not the exact icons, but the usage pattern is still alive and well with the Cinnamon and MATE desktops (the latter with the Redmond preset iirc). I won't use anything else.
- oso2k 4y ago
  Also, you can write Win32 apps on Linux with Nano-X/Microwindows. http://www.microwindows.org/ http://www.microwindows.org/
  - anthk 4y ago
    Just use WineLib.
panzi 4y ago
They need to make the dialogs resizeable, though. Those tiny dialogs where you have to scroll basically in the eye of a needle are ridiculous.
kyleee 4y ago
Fun and a bit sad to think about from some angles. For instance the often maligned baby boomer generation essentially had the UI/UX rug from pulled from underneath them leading to loss of confidence and computer skill regression. Not to mention probably opened them up further to fishing and other computer scams due to a combination of UI churn, generally being flustered by changing conventions, etc. Not to pin all their computing woes on this, but I think it’s had a large negative effect
- int_19h 4y ago
  Multiple times, at that. I remember buying the very first iPad for my mom. One thing that she really liked was that huge, prominent physical button that you could press to immediately go to the home screen. No matter which app she ended up in and how confusing it was, the safe place was always there within easy reach. It made her that much more confident to actually go and explore. Now, she's supposed to slide from the bottom edge, I suppose. Except if you don't do it vigorously enough, it doesn't actually bring you home. But, hey, the gadget is now 15mm shorter!
nektro 4y ago
https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/

wildrhythms 4y ago

How the hell did we regress from these immediately recognizable works of art to what we have today: uninspired, barely discernable hieroglyphs? See Material icons, Bootstrap icons, Font Awesome... all boring as hell, and for how many N millions of dollars these corporations spend on artists and graphic designers and UX designers they still can't seem to break out of this tired trend. "Ah but hieroglyph icons of today scale better!" Well, hieroglyph icons of today scale consistently, but remember the icon designers back in the day would make different sizes of each icon to be clearly recognizable at all scales (the whole point of the .ico format!), and to me that is way better than what we have now.

Waterluvian 4y ago
I fully agree. I’ll throw out a thought: they don’t translate well into the higher resolutions. Actually I doubt this. But the very simple, dumb icons probably scale more cleanly.
Dalewyn 4y ago
Part of it probably has to do with how sterile modern hieroglyphs are. Look at those Windows 3.1/95/98/ME/2K/XP/Vista/7 icons: They have character. You try and tell me they didn't have fun drawing the icons for MS Agent and Dr. Watson; the fun and sense of humor the devs and artists had making them just ooze out. Modern day hieroglyphs? They aim to not confuse or offend anyone, and end up impressing noone. They aim to speak all languages and end up speaking nothing. They aim to inform everyone and end up informing noone.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kyleee 4y ago
  I have to concur. I find that I am somewhat icon blind these days and can scan over an icon/app that I am looking for multiple times in certain instances before finding it
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago

causality0 4y ago

One fundamental concept we've given up is "what you see is what you get". Open up a window from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 7 and things that behave different look different. The part of the window "inside" and the part of the window border you can click and drag to resize or move around are two different colors. The minimize, maximize, and close buttons are a different color from the part of the title bar you can click to move the window around. Not so anymore. The "close" button is now a visible X and an invisible rectangle around the X. The drag-able border of the window is an invisible radius surrounding the edge of a window. I hope the executive responsible for this rots in hell.

zxcvbnm 4y ago
Exactly. Eg. at some point Ubuntu (true also for Win) decided no proper borders around windows and giant title bars. Now I always struggle findig the border, to grab, between two partially overlapping black terminal windows. And wasting screen realestate on title bars and margins just bugs the hell out of me. I've spent hours trying to fix these things, gave up in the end, there was always something that didn't work right. Why did the world forget doing reasonable defaults that just work without tweaking. Oh and don't get me started on disappearing scrollbars, and lazy loading ui components, which reorder what's under focus/mouse/finger every half a second, and make me do a wrong click if I'm in a hurry
- anthk 4y ago
  Scrollbar fix: edit /etc/profile.d/gtk.sh, add this: #!/bin/sh export GTK_NO_OVERLAY=1 Chmod +x it. On theming: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 It works best with Ubuntu Mate. With Ubuntu Gnome it will work but not so integrated.
- bmacho 4y ago
  > Exactly. Eg. at some point Ubuntu (true also for Win) decided no proper borders around windows and giant title bars. Now I always struggle findig the border, to grab, between two partially overlapping black terminal windows. Try setting up alt + right click, or windows + right click to resize the windows. I have AltDrag installed on Windows, and I can grab my windows anywhere to move or resize.

whalesalad 4y ago

Personally, Win XP was the pinnacle of Windows. Everything has gone downhill since then.

bluedino 4y ago
As long as you turn off the Fisher Price interface
- whalesalad 4y ago
  It’s my fav! Loved the media center ui too.
- toast0 4y ago
  It wasn't so bad as long as you turned the window title height down to normal. Then it was nice because you wouldn't prick your finger on sharp edges anymore. Out of the box, the extra window title height took up too much room, ugh. But then now there's so much whitespace everywhere.
endgame 4y ago
I call it the start of the decline, as it was the first version of Windows which featured on-line activation, legitimising the practice in the wider industry.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Microsoft online product activation was first introduced in Office 97, a few years before WinXP.
  - Hublium 4y ago
    Where do you have this information from? As far as I know, product activation for office started with Office XP ("2002").
    - int_19h 4y ago

sublinear 4y ago

All icons are confusing until they're burned into your memory. How confusing they are has more to do with the complexity of the operation they symbolize than the design of the icon itself. Naming is hard. Symbolizing is hard. Normalizing operations is not hard. I don't blame modern icons. I blame poor abstractions driven by marketing becoming the norm.

jrockway 4y ago
I'm waiting for designers to figure out some way to signify "save" without using a picture of a floppy disk. That was great back in the day, but I bet a large number of computer users have never seen a diskette.
- int_19h 4y ago
  SD card shape would be a logical replacement today, I think.
  - warning26 4y ago
    Who is saving to an SD card these days? If we want to be really accurate, it would probably have to be a representation of a flash memory chip.
    - derefr 4y ago
      People who use cameras (dash cams, action cams, drone cameras), portable game consoles (by which I mean the Switch, yes, but also all those Shezhen "retro consoles"), and a few other things. People do still know what SD cards are, even if they don't have a slot for one on their flagship phone. Nevertheless, the real issue is more that "saving" isn't really something you do any more; almost all apps now autosave and restore on restart, such that the real action that needs an icon isn't "save"; it's the option you get when you indicate you'd like to close an open, but unnamed project/document without quitting the application: "give this project/document a name."
    - int_19h 4y ago

101008 4y ago

Oh, so beautiful and so nostalgic. I think I always associated unconsciously GIF with the green color, and JPEG with the red color. The explanation may be on these icons: JPG is the frame with a red painting, while GIF is the frame with the green painting. I remember using them as a kid a lot in the 2000s when designing my own webpages in Frontpage + Paint.

jdelman 4y ago

Cool browser. But, these icons were not meant to be rendered with the heavy anti-aliasing performed by today's web browsers and displays. There is now a CSS property `image-rendering` which you can set to `pixelated` to perform nearest-neighbor resizing. This looks great as long as you use a sensible whole-number multiple for the image dimensions. Try adding a `* {image-rendering: 'pixelated'}` in dev tools and you can see these icons in their true glory.

layer8 4y ago
They were meant to be rendered with the inherent anti-aliasing of a CRT screen. Pixelated rendering on a high-DPI screen will look quite different.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Color LCDs were common on Windows laptops in 1998, and decent CRTs in late 1990s were quite sharp. Pixelated rendering is closest to the design intent IMO.

alberth 4y ago

Windows 2000, to me, was the pinnacle. It had a number of refinements. Gallery of screenshots https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win2000advserv https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win2000advserv

panzi 4y ago
Agreed.
Waterluvian 4y ago
I’d love to know the story behind why CD player is so different. Gotta be cool?
- p_l 4y ago
  1990s multimedia skeumorphism. Honestly, the cd player is quite understated there...
- cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  it was made to look like a car streo i guess
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  It's from the Windows 98 Plus Pack. They didn't rewrite it for Windows 2000, they just used it as-is, so it retains the Windows 98 "Plus" look.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Oh that old chestnut. Is 2000 filled with 98 and 95 UIs like modern times?
    - chungy 4y ago
      Yes, but 95+98+2000 were basically all of the same design philosophy, so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb when something was not changed from 95.

Waterluvian 4y ago

What came first? Apple’s trash or Windows’ recycle bin? I always assumed the latter because it feels like a “we need to be different but throw a tiny bit of shade while we’re at it.”

cokeandpepsi 4y ago
i think the concept originated with lisa
- slater 4y ago
  Likely more with the Xerox stuff that Apple uhh... "improved upon"... https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-information-system/ https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-inf...
  - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
    It wouldn't suprise me if that was the case
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chriscjcj 4y ago
To answer your specific question, Apple's Lisa was released on January 19, 1983. It had a waste basket. The Mac OS and its trash can debuted along with the original Macintosh computer on January 24, 1984. Windows introduced the recycle bin along with Windows 95 which was released on August 24, 1995.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Thanks! And yeah, it seems like this is part of the "ripping off Xerox" saga. Now I'm curious what Microsoft did Between 1984 and 1995. Time to go boot up Windows 3.1.
Narishma 4y ago

panzi 4y ago

The icon gallery could use image-rendering: pixelated, though. For 4k and "retina" displays. Otherwise the browser upscales it with cubic interpolation and it will look blurry.

layer8 4y ago
It was blurry on CRT as well, though a different kind of blurry. It's difficult to reproduce the original look.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  Reproducing CRT anti-aliasing on an LCD display requires a sufficiently high-density display and a shader applied to the text.

jiggawatts 4y ago

I'm a big fan of the SVG icons used in the Azure Portal. They're embedded directly into the HTML, so they're efficient. Their design is simple and looks good both at small sizes and scaled up. They have a fairly consistent color scheme and "design language", making them easily recognisable. You can download the SVG files separately and embed them in design documents, preserving the high-quality vector art format! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/ Compare these to the AWS icon set, which are just lines on a single-color square: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/ https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/

albert_e 4y ago
I have my own complaints with how AWS does their icons. however current icon set used by AWS is way better than the "3D" icons they had earlier I think having "lines on a square" can also be converted to SVG. In fact AWS page you linked does have an "Assets Package" download that included both PNG and SVG icons for both light and dark backgrounds. the "single-color square" is actually a gradient fill too -- whether that is better is subjective. I have always felt the need for an API that serves the correct icon in chosen resolution and format. we recently saw a HN post that argued that architecture diagrams should be code. this would be one necessary step towards that.

metadat 4y ago

Previous discussion from back in January 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18953542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18953542 (358 comments) Some good nuggets of timeless insights.

userbinator 4y ago
It's surprising how 2019 feels just like yesterday to me, yet that was already 4 years ago. In comparison, 1998 was 25 years ago, and that did feel like it was a long time.
- metadat 4y ago
  The pandemic has frozen time in some ways. Time is strange enough already and the pando has compounded it.
- hulitu 4y ago
  In 1998 MS had design. Now it is all crap.

berjin 4y ago

[flagged]

farkanoid 4y ago
Pregnant person!
- hackmiester 4y ago
  Yes, there are all three.
Pxtl 4y ago
Trans men exist. I mean it's kind of edge-casey to include in Unicode, because trans-man pregnancies aren't super common, but if you're going to do both genders for all the other things, makes sense for that too.
- hackmiester 4y ago
  I am trans and I do feel that this is the most accurate take.
- vvovo 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - danudey 4y ago
    Trans men are men, regardless of what bigots might try to convince people of.
    - vvovo 4y ago
      [flagged]
afavour 4y ago
Is there anything that isn’t immediately turned into a pointless culture war argument these days? This is an article about the design of Windows 98 icons. You’re complaining about two emojis in 2023. I really have to wonder about the thought process that sees “iconography” and immediately goes to “can you believe Apple made a pregnant man emoji?!?”. It’s exhausting.

boredemployee 4y ago

Things like that always catch me. I reflect about how many effort people put in the past and then they suddenly get replaced (and it doesnt mean it is for the better). The same to video games. Every year a new fifa, a new cod, etc. and lots of efforts and energy stay in the past. What was super exciting back then people dont even remember it existed today.

lamacase 4y ago

I dunno, I think a lot of early windows icons were kind of hard to differentiate at a glance. A lot of them are just computers or windows with different smaller icons on them. You can see this even in the examples shown from the collection. I generally agree that modern attempts to "unify" the design of icons usually go to far, but if you think Windows 98 icons are strictly better than say Windows 11 icons, that seems like rose coloured glasses to me. The good ones are good, but the bad ones are worse. Although I do understand the appeal, and subjectively I do like them better.

lostmsu 4y ago
As much as I am nostalgic, I agree with this. So many people here say how intuitive icons were, but which one of you can explain the meaning of the 5th icon on the first picture in the article, the one with an app window in front of a folder? I used Windows starting with 95, so it probably saw it many-many times. But now it is impossible to either remember or guess its meaning.
- deadbeeves 4y ago
  It's the icon for the "Programs" submenu of the Start menu. It is somewhat cryptic, but I think it's difficult to communicate "here's where your installed programs can be accessed" graphically. I don't think the icon is used anywhere else, so it's not much of a problem. You'll never see it out of context without the accompanying text.

kypro 4y ago

It's genuinely hard for me to understand some of the UI/UX decisions made in the latest versions of Windows. Old versions of Windows seemed to be built in a intuitive way so even someone with no computer experience would have a chance at finding what they were looking for. Icons were designed to look like what they do. Things were labelled with text. The interface was predictable. Where as today everything just seems obscure and random... For one, we don't have a "start" button anymore, we have a four square thing which you're suppose to just know to click. If I want to get to the control panel I have to erm... Search for it on the four squared menu thing? I'm not even sure there is a "proper" way to navigate there anymore, instead you just need to know there is a thing called the "control panel" and search for it. And even then you're never 100% sure if you want the "control panel" or "settings". And why do these two interfaces have completely different UIs? It's like the whole OS is designed to be as confusing as possible. If I didn't have experience with prior versions of Windows I'm not sure I'd even know how to do the most basic things.

batiudrami 4y ago
There are issues with the modern windows user interface but I’m not sure it’s these. For one “start” was never actually how most people started using the computer - it is through desktop shortcuts, so the label didn’t really make sense. The control panel is depreciated and remains for compatibility reasons and is deliberately hidden in favour of the settings button, which uses the now familiar gear icon.
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  > For one “start” was never actually how most people started using the computer - it is through desktop shortcuts This is just wrong haha. Here's a raymond chen post: > But one thing kept getting kicked up by usability tests: People booted up the computer and just sat there, unsure what to do next. > That’s when we decided to label the System button “Start”. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030722-00/?p=43083 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030722-00/?p=43... Edit: I hope this comment doesn't come off as rude or anything too :). I just remember reading about this in Raymond's book and the fact that the start menu originally didn't say start stuck out to me.

marcuskaz 4y ago

BeOS were my favorite. https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos

ykonstant 4y ago
Wow, those look amazing.
drooopy 4y ago
I'm fairly certain that if Apple kept on developing classic Mac OS, its icons would not look dissimilar to those.

vaygr 4y ago

It feels to me you had to be born at specific time to truly appreciate pixelart. I show it to my wife (who's just 5 years younger), and she's like: "No.".

speedgoose 4y ago
They aren’t very beautiful pixel art icons. Maybe a bit when seen through nostalgia glasses. They are well made though.
thiht 4y ago
I love pixel art, used Win 98 as my first OS and still find them ugly as hell. The colors are sad, the perspective is off, and on the first image[1], only 2 icons out of 6 make any sense to me (the trash and the folder). On the second image[2] I understand the wheelchair and the notepad but that's it. These icons aren't inherently easier to understand. [1]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/win98-icons-1.png https://alexmeub.com/assets/win98-icons-1.png [2]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/project-windows98-icons.png https://alexmeub.com/assets/project-windows98-icons.png

rqtwteye 4y ago

Years ago I tried to teach my dad how to work with Windows. He somehow wasn't capable of seeing the window borders and which window was in front. Also didn't see buttons. Recently I have noticed that I am also beginning to struggle seeing the window borders in Windows 10. If design trends continue I may also soon be unable to operate my laptop :-(. I appreciate that MacOS hasn't gone as crazy as Window.

doubled112 4y ago
Windows doesn't render drop shadows in an RDP session, and I've had a few times where I clicked the wrong window because there is no border.
hulitu 4y ago
In old windows (95, 98, 2000) it was pretty clear which window has focus and which don't. In Win 10 is a mess.

markwong 4y ago

Imho, the BeOS icons are better than Win9x icons.

helf 4y ago

UIs these days have terrible icons and amazing amounts of wasted screen space. I don’t get it. Everything is so sterile and “modern” as others have mentioned.

sergiotapia 4y ago

Just look at the top right icon in the first image. Two computers connected by a pipe of sorts. The computers are two different colors, immediately telling you they are two separate entities (not a clone). The pipe has a bright yellow notch. Just perfection, damn! I wonder where the team is now and what they're designing. Anyone know?

munificent 4y ago

You never forget your first love. I always felt like the Win98 icons were subpar because they didn't have a consistent perspective and the shading was unnecessary and not very well done. Everything is shaped like flat surfaces but shaded as if it's rounded and bulge-y. The Mac System 7 icons were what made me fall in love with icon design. There are so crisp and legible, and create a consistent metaphor and perspective that spans the entire desktop and glues it together. And they still manage to have a little charm and warmth.

FatActor 4y ago
I remember reading someone (Steve Albini?) who said, paraphrased, "Your musical tastes as an adult were defined when you were 14."
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  I don't know if that's true. I don't listen to anything remotely simlar to what I listened to as 14.
  - matwood 4y ago
    Same. Maybe genres are roughly set, but for me that wasn't even true. I didn't start to get a deep appreciation for classical music until my 20s. I think the popularity of music streaming services has made it so easy to try and find new (new to them) music, that people continue to discover forever now.
  - FatActor 4y ago
    It is common in English to make statements like this that are attempting to assert a general hypothesis, and are not expected to pedantically account for every individual human being.
adamrezich 4y ago
> Everything is shaped like flat surfaces but shaded as if it's rounded and bulge-y. but that's the best part!!

zmmmmm 4y ago

I really do think functional UI design peaked somewhere in the early to mid 2000's. Right after that people started speaking of skeumorphism as a pejorative and that meant anything that looked 3d in any sense or resembled any kind of real world object had to be scrubbed out. If you could tell what something did, that by definition meant it was old fashioned! And the UI frameworks at the time almost made it hard to build something where there was a UI action without a corresponding menu item and shortcut key. You could bring up the menus like a site map of the application to see everything it could do (site maps - another relic of the 2000's!).

leonidasv 4y ago
I still see people confused about sandwich menus. They don't recognise those 3 stacked lines as a menu button. I think I only recognise it immediately because I was involved with Web development when that thing came along, but to this day I always end up having to help someone, even tech people, finding some menu when browsing the web together.
- toyg 4y ago
  Yeah, "hamburger menus" are the modern equivalent of right-click: very useful once you understand it, but very difficult for the general population to get to grip with.
  - layer8 4y ago
    Hamburger menus are not really the equivalent of right-click context menus, because they aren't contextual to elements on the screen. Long press would be the equivalent of right click, but it isn't used very much.
pcurve 4y ago
Agreed. Once you give something a label, it takes on life of its own. I think the sound of the word "skeumorphism" probably didn't help either.

leke 4y ago

I also have fond memories of the Windows 3.1 icons. I loved the old layout of the windows OS. If I was any good at Linux, I would make a distro/desktop behave exactly like 98.

_8j50 4y ago

The middle two and bottom right of the first pic make no sense to me. I don't get this nostalgia. One of my first C projects was a failed attempt at using opengl to do a 3d desktop environment. Still frustrated at how archaic the desktop and webui is. The future is held hostage by the past.

29athrowaway 4y ago

OS/2, BeOS, MacOS 8, Amiga and KDE 2 icons were great too. Then you've got Irix icons, and probably on the last place, Solaris CDE.

Underphil 4y ago
'Amiga' is a pretty broad brush. Which ones in particular?
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Amiga Workbench icons.
hulitu 4y ago
CDE is ok.

nunez 4y ago

Feels really nostalgic. I was definitely around when all we had were 32x32 ICOs and "Windows Classic" (RIP). All of these look old as hell now. What's interesting is that while Windows 2000 is completely unrecognizable from Windows 11 (mmc, winver, and devmgmt.msc aside), OS X Jaguar looks and feels the same as macOS Ventura (System Prefs aside), just way more skeumorphic. Same with iOS (it basically hasn't changed since iOS 7). I think that's a testament to how insanely talented the designers at Apple are/were.

ihatepython 4y ago
In my opinion, iOS 5 was the peak for iOS, iOS 7 is where everything went off the rails. Present-day iOS has a notch, a screen with rounded corners, no home button, and endless places on the screen that are swipe-able. Haven't used OS X since Mojave, but compared to Jaguar, there are no scrollbars, the interface is designed more for a trackpad instead of a mouse. The peak for OS X in my opinion was the Panther/Tiger/Snow Leopard era.
- leokennis 4y ago
  While I agree current day iOS is overcomplicated with too much white space and mystery interactions, one thing I do not miss is the home button. The gestures to go back to the Home Screen and to switch apps work extremely well and intuitively.

axiolite 4y ago

Windows NT4.0 icons were the best: https://winuxinfocenter.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/desktop-1.png https://winuxinfocenter.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/deskto... Why 98? Same icons on 95 were they not? No argument that the Windows UI has gone massively downhill with each successive release. But hey, if they make it complicated enough, needing to add/remove programs in 3-4 different places, maybe you'll search for everything with Cortana and then they can track and guide you into their own services.

treve 4y ago
I don't remember the gradients. Was that a later update?
toyg 4y ago
> Why 98? Same icons on 95 were they not? No. Iirc 98 have more colors and better resolutions.
thomasz 4y ago
That is just nostalgia. There is something to be said about the icon design, but you really wouldn’t want the II of that era back. Nowadays you start an application by clicking a fixed location in the task bar or by pressing the windows key and typing the first two or three letters. Back than, you had to navigate a ridiculous start menu tree. Windows didn’t snap to the borders, task bar entries would move around. There was no search beyond the file system, so you either needed a ton of luck, a ton of time or a superhuman memory to change some obscure settings.
- Hublium 4y ago
  Press <Windows>+R, "calc" <Return>. Easy and fast, if you can remember the exact names of the executables. Also, back then Windows came not only with printed manuals, but also with an actually useful help system and not one that just makes a Bing search.
  - pedrogpimenta 4y ago

alkonaut 4y ago

I don't care if it feels like a place to get real work done or not. Whether I do get real work done matters of course, but I want it to look like a really nicely designed space too. And by nice design I mean beautiful to look at, not merely "designed to get work done" in the industrial design sense. Just like working in an office effectively shouldn't mean it has to be decorated with complete utilitarianism at every turn, nor should by screen. Am I strange to tend to like app and OS redesigns if they make things look fresh, even when they might slow me down slightly, or even slow my machine down? I just wanted to be the contrarian voice here. Redesign all you want. It's ok to say "Let's choose just a little bit of form over function here". I usually like the new better than the old. No, Win2000 wasn't the pinnacle of Windows neither in function nor design. There I said it.

cuddlyogre 4y ago
The occasional refresh is expected. Revamping the UI every two years is not. It makes it impossible to do anything other than watch youtube. Supporting a network with a mixture of OSs that kind of match but not really is an exercise in frustration.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago
The problem is that it's gone too far to the other side, aesthetics with little respect for function. It's akin to that office that has no desk because it would ruin the aesthetics. The desk has to be there, your challenge is (should be) to design around the functional requirements.
- atoav 4y ago
  Good designers try to reach a good solution where multiple (seemingly opposed to each other) requirements are covered in such a way, they enhance each other's qualities. That being said, designers work with customers and as a former freelance designer I can tell you that wrangling the customer is basically half the job. This is true even in a company setting. Design is one of those fields where everybody thinks they know what works and everybody thinks they have taste (spoiler alert: they don't). I ultimately stopped working in the field because you literally had to manipulate customers into making okay choices instead of horrible ones and even then you had the occasional CEO just overriding weeks of work with some bullshit idea he had on the shitter. Everybody blames designers, but designers rarely make the choices that lead to the results everybody sees. Designers just try to get paid.

Annatar 4y ago

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guerrilla 4y ago

Yeah they aren't too bad, but I still think the BeOS ones were better [1] 1. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=beos+icons&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=beos+icons&iax=images&ia=im...

qwerty456127 4y ago

An icon pack which included many icons in this style came with VisualStudio/WindowsSDK. MS Office 2003 toolbar icons also are worth extracting. By the way, Windows 98 icons are Number-Two for me, the real Number-One top were Windows 3.11 icons.

mcv 4y ago

I've always felt they were hideous, but I guess that's a matter of taste. They certainly are consistent, functional and clear, and that's the important part.

guidedlight 4y ago

I believe most of these icons are embedded in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\shell32.dll file. Also check out C:\WINDOWS\system32\moricons.dll for even older icons.

ilyt 4y ago

Meanwhile Google ones get worse and worse. I don't think old MS ones look nice but they are instantly recognizable (and really, most stuff from those times. Nowadays we're getting weird trend to either monochromatize or outright abstract icons that can't be easily associated with a thing. When we had 256 colors and tiny amount of pixels developers used every single one of them, now we have millions and get colorful squares

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Yep... This picture says it all: https://i.imgur.com/jaXMYHr.png https://i.imgur.com/jaXMYHr.png I also hate the minimalism of small greyish singe-color outline icons, where everything looks the same, and you don't know what it does... a grey square? A stop button? Oh no, it shows the list of already open apps... circle with an outline? Yep, everybody thinks "home" (button) when they see a circle... etc.
hulitu 4y ago
> Meanwhile Google ones get worse and worse And Microsoft copies from Google. What can be worse than that ?

meerita 4y ago

Nothing beats Mac OS 9 icons. They were just in another league.

anthk 4y ago
Check OSX' grandaddy icons: the NextStep/GNUStep ones.
- meerita 4y ago
  Yeah, I had the chance to use most of the oldest OS's, I would say Mac OS 8 to 9 are the best icons that I found best, of course Win 95 was sweet, I really loved their work.

sbaiddn 4y ago

Windows 2000 was the best MS OS IMHO. Looked just like win98, but was from their NT line.

matwood 4y ago
I agree, but I may be biased. Windows 2000 was the last Windows I used for any significant amount of time.

nirav72 4y ago

I love the win98 icons. But that teal background was something i found just fugly.

hulitu 4y ago
When i saw it on a Tektronix monitor, i was enlighted.

cm2187 4y ago

Unfortunately function lost to form. All icons are grey now. The biggest problem I have with Windows is borderless windows, where if you have a white window over another white window, 1) there is no way to tell where it ends, 2) if you want to grab the edge to resize it your mouse must be precise to the exact pixel, which is even harder when you are dealing with citrix remote desktop. But I guess the most important thing is that it doesn't offend its designer's taste. I will try to resize those damn things again and again.

hifix 4y ago

There's a lot of rose-tinted glasses in this thread and this is coming from someone who grew up using computers with these sorts of icons and designs. I appreciate the aesthetic, but I still think that many of them are too difficult to distinguish on their own, regardless of whether they're in full-colour skeuomorphic or a flat line icon. As another commenter pointed out, a lot of them are just variations of a computer / folder / paper with other icons stacked on them in different ways or sizes. In any case, you would want a supporting label to really convey the meaning. While I love to see these sorts of icons in personal sites and projects, the reality is that if I presented icons like these to a client for a SaaS app in 2023, I'd be sent back to the drawing board. No serious business wants their UI to look like it just stepped out of the 90's.