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Icons used to be meaningful and convey what they did. Now it's mostly shiny fancy crap, and they all look the same. I always find it difficult to find VSCode on

Icons used to be meaningful and convey what they did. Now it's mostly shiny fancy crap, and they all look the same. I always find it difficult to find VSCode on macOS because a lot of apps use similar colors and patterns. I tried customizing VSC's icon but it goes back to its ugly confusing default icon after each update.

nunobrito 3y ago
Or worse, icons get grouped and they removed the labels for apps when launched. Fairly awful having to scroll through the equal icons to get back into the expected terminal or file browser path. Usability has really been going down the drain to copy smartphones into the desktop.
- masswerk 3y ago
  My pet grievance is Apple's progressive transition from direct manipulation and drag-and-drop to the most evil click-and-wait-to-reveal-and-reorient-the-pointer-to-eventually-drag scheme, e.g., for proxy icons.
krm01 3y ago
I’ve designed many interfaces. Icons and use of icons is a difficult story. It used to be simpler, because many of the operations the icons would represent were digitized actions that previously had a physical component. For example: save was iconified as a diskette. Later we had upload icons being a cloud with an arrow going up to indicate ‘upload to the cloud’. Today we design Interfaces for Machine Learning software, where an action might be ‘load language model’. These are actions that don’t have a history rooted in physical space. Or in the case of the upload icon, a visual metaphor. So the iconography space is currently in an interesting phase. We have to create new metaphors if we want to keep utilizing benefits of icons in UI.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  This is not really extrapolable enough to claim a trend. I am using a piece of software from the 90s that has an icon for "Load transistor switching activity history" which is frankly even more abstract. Yet most if not all desktop/office software from the 20s sill uses icons that are based on physical objects. They even use a diskette as save. i.e. Specialized software is going to be specialized. It's not new.
pantalaimon 3y ago
While I also dislike the trend towards minimal icons, I don’t think the ones in this project are a good example. They are more whimsical than they are helpful. Without the text I wouldn’t be able to tell what they mean.

nunobrito 3y ago

Or worse, icons get grouped and they removed the labels for apps when launched. Fairly awful having to scroll through the equal icons to get back into the expected terminal or file browser path. Usability has really been going down the drain to copy smartphones into the desktop.

masswerk 3y ago
My pet grievance is Apple's progressive transition from direct manipulation and drag-and-drop to the most evil click-and-wait-to-reveal-and-reorient-the-pointer-to-eventually-drag scheme, e.g., for proxy icons.

krm01 3y ago

I’ve designed many interfaces. Icons and use of icons is a difficult story. It used to be simpler, because many of the operations the icons would represent were digitized actions that previously had a physical component. For example: save was iconified as a diskette. Later we had upload icons being a cloud with an arrow going up to indicate ‘upload to the cloud’. Today we design Interfaces for Machine Learning software, where an action might be ‘load language model’. These are actions that don’t have a history rooted in physical space. Or in the case of the upload icon, a visual metaphor. So the iconography space is currently in an interesting phase. We have to create new metaphors if we want to keep utilizing benefits of icons in UI.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
This is not really extrapolable enough to claim a trend. I am using a piece of software from the 90s that has an icon for "Load transistor switching activity history" which is frankly even more abstract. Yet most if not all desktop/office software from the 20s sill uses icons that are based on physical objects. They even use a diskette as save. i.e. Specialized software is going to be specialized. It's not new.

pantalaimon 3y ago

While I also dislike the trend towards minimal icons, I don’t think the ones in this project are a good example. They are more whimsical than they are helpful. Without the text I wouldn’t be able to tell what they mean.