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Maybe I'm getting old, but seeing conversations like this irritate me. All I see in that wall of text are activity indicators, upload icons, and "TO THE CLOUD!

Maybe I'm getting old, but seeing conversations like this irritate me. All I see in that wall of text are activity indicators, upload icons, and "TO THE CLOUD!!!" icons. Internet Comment Designers seem to think that skeuomorphism (a word they love using to tell the world 'LOOK, I KNOW BIG WORDS SO I MUST BE GOOD AT THINGS') must always be a bad thing...as if using the icon to save as a floppy disk is somehow less confusing to the average person than a circle with line, space, longer line, space, shorter line, space, rest of circle is somehow more intuitive. People use & all the time and don't know what it means. Hell, @ doesn't even have a clear definition! But people know what it means, and that's what matters. How come people don't use a hard disk as a save icon? How come the icon of a CD didn't catch on as a "Burn" action? Its not because these actions are any less actionable than "saving" to a floppy disk. Its because you can clearly tell WHAT a floppy is compared to other donut looking objects, and that is what matters! You don't need to flatten the UI or make something you think looks like an IEC symbol (protip: the symbol you all use for on/off is IEC 5009 symbol for "standby"). All you need to do is make sure that the symbol is unique enough that it can't be confused for anything else. Having the added back story that it used to "be" something else makes it trivia fodder in 50 years. Yes, Apple is stupid for making their calendar look like a book. No, I am not a knuckle-dragging cave man for thinking a floppy disk is a good symbol for "commit to disk." Get off my damned lawn.

jacalata 14y ago
Absolutely. Anyway, if skeumorphism is bad, and the floppy icon is so unrecognisable as to be abstract (which appears to be the 'problem' these designers think needs solving), doesn't that mean the floppy icon is now good?
- dragonwriter 14y ago
  > Anyway, if skeumorphism is bad, and the floppy icon is so unrecognisable as to be abstract (which appears to be the 'problem' these designers think needs solving), doesn't that mean the floppy icon is now good? The short answer is "No." The long answer is that the skeumorphism is bad argument is generally that trying to imitate some kind of physical analog of the computerized process you are doing isn't an effective way of presenting a UI, in part because it imposes additional constraints that aren't native to the medium you are using (limiting your ability to fully utilize the medium you are using) and that it relies on experience with the particular physical analog to provide user understanding of the UI. An icon that is functionally abstract because it references something that is outside of most users experience would be an example of the problem, not something that somehow flips it on its head and so becomes good. (OTOH, the use of the floppy-disk-image-as-save-icon is so ubiquitous in software that it is probably a useful image that is well recognized, but that's neither because it originates as a skeumorph or because it is abstract now, but because it is ubiquitous in the digital realm, independent of its origin or current relation to user's non-digital experience.)
  - ChikkaChiChi 14y ago
    Agreed. Its good because its not an identifier with the action, not the object.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    In other words, it doesn't matter that it's the image of "a 3.5in floppy disk," it matters that that's a symbol that tells people "save."
fryguy 14y ago
Isn't the standby mode appropriate for power switches that are momentary toggle switches that started in ATX cases, as opposed to the on/off button which would be appropriate for the AT cases, where the switch is an actual power switch?
- ChikkaChiChi 14y ago
  Yes but you see it in use incorrectly all the time (including in that thread). In fact, the Windows 8 machine I'm on (shudder) actually represents "Shut Down" using the standby icon.
  - fryguy 14y ago
    When you press the "shut down" button on your computer, it is going into a soft shutdown state. I don't see the problem here. The On/Off icon should be exclusively used for things that physically sever the power source from the device, which no computers do to my knowledge.
xsmasher 14y ago
FYI this is not skeuomorphism, it's more like anachronism. Different 50-cent word.
- ChikkaChiChi 14y ago
  Excellent catch and you just taught me 50-cent word. I love it. To be fair, I did just go back and search and anachronism had been used but skeuomorphism was not. Looks like I've been spending too much time on HN and Reddit!

jacalata 14y ago

Absolutely. Anyway, if skeumorphism is bad, and the floppy icon is so unrecognisable as to be abstract (which appears to be the 'problem' these designers think needs solving), doesn't that mean the floppy icon is now good?

dragonwriter 14y ago
> Anyway, if skeumorphism is bad, and the floppy icon is so unrecognisable as to be abstract (which appears to be the 'problem' these designers think needs solving), doesn't that mean the floppy icon is now good? The short answer is "No." The long answer is that the skeumorphism is bad argument is generally that trying to imitate some kind of physical analog of the computerized process you are doing isn't an effective way of presenting a UI, in part because it imposes additional constraints that aren't native to the medium you are using (limiting your ability to fully utilize the medium you are using) and that it relies on experience with the particular physical analog to provide user understanding of the UI. An icon that is functionally abstract because it references something that is outside of most users experience would be an example of the problem, not something that somehow flips it on its head and so becomes good. (OTOH, the use of the floppy-disk-image-as-save-icon is so ubiquitous in software that it is probably a useful image that is well recognized, but that's neither because it originates as a skeumorph or because it is abstract now, but because it is ubiquitous in the digital realm, independent of its origin or current relation to user's non-digital experience.)
- ChikkaChiChi 14y ago
  Agreed. Its good because its not an identifier with the action, not the object.
- rhizome 14y ago
  In other words, it doesn't matter that it's the image of "a 3.5in floppy disk," it matters that that's a symbol that tells people "save."

fryguy 14y ago

Isn't the standby mode appropriate for power switches that are momentary toggle switches that started in ATX cases, as opposed to the on/off button which would be appropriate for the AT cases, where the switch is an actual power switch?

ChikkaChiChi 14y ago
Yes but you see it in use incorrectly all the time (including in that thread). In fact, the Windows 8 machine I'm on (shudder) actually represents "Shut Down" using the standby icon.
- fryguy 14y ago
  When you press the "shut down" button on your computer, it is going into a soft shutdown state. I don't see the problem here. The On/Off icon should be exclusively used for things that physically sever the power source from the device, which no computers do to my knowledge.

xsmasher 14y ago

FYI this is not skeuomorphism, it's more like anachronism. Different 50-cent word.

ChikkaChiChi 14y ago
Excellent catch and you just taught me 50-cent word. I love it. To be fair, I did just go back and search and anachronism had been used but skeuomorphism was not. Looks like I've been spending too much time on HN and Reddit!