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

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.