There Is Only One Cloud Icon (2011) | Hacker News Reader

There Is Only One Cloud Icon (2011)

hanselman.com

64 pointsli4ick19 comments

I have long been amused by this — and it shows the dominance of marketing.

> Of course, there's only so many ways to draw a cloud, right?

Well into the early ‘00s I would draw the ‘cloud’ (typically on a white board) the way it appeared in the early TCP papers (the origin of the term): a more vaguely symmetrical or “round” shape, not something with a sharp straight bottom. A “dust cloud”, if you will, that obscured its inner workings.

But of course once they heard engineers use that words, marketers misunderstood the metaphor, drew a cumulus cloud, and ran with it. And now we have a metaphor that doesn’t actually mean anything. As usual.

You’re missing the point. Clearly this is proof Star Trek and nearly all scifi have had it right: evolution always produces a hominid form with 2 legs/arms as dominant life forms. /s

just to nitpick: in star trek it's not evolution, most humanoid races have a shared origin http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Humanoid :)

That was a good episode too!

I actually think the cumulus cloud makes more sense for The Cloud™. The TCP model was describing a peer-to-peer model with the "cloud" as just an intermediary that carried your packets around, but in the model used by Cloud™ services, it's an omnipresent eternal amorphous entity to which the puny clients report and from which they receive data. Other peers, if they exist in the service at all, communicate only in a form mediated by The Cloud™.

> a metaphor that doesn’t actually mean anything. As usual.

It is no longer a metaphor. Like the save icon, It is an idiom or symbol: a metaphor that has kicked the bucket. You can argue[1] that we shouldn't use idioms if we've forgotten what they originally refer to. In the case of "kick the bucket", you'd be right. It would be clearer and more accessible to just say "died". Few people have the sort of visceral memory of an animal being tied up in a bucket[2] and thrashing around that gives the phrase its extra punch. In the case of the save icon, we have no real widely-understood alternative. In the case of the cloud, the same is true. The danger is reinforcing a sense of understanding where there is none--but I'm not sure there is a misunderstanding here.

[1] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...

[2] a type of butchers frame

I assumed (forgive the macabre topic) that "kicking the bucket" referred to the action of kicking over the bucket you are standing on in order to hang yourself.

I wonder if Mr. Safire has written about this.

The common feature to the cloud icons elsewhere in the article is "Two bumps on top, one large and one small" - whereas in the BBC weather screen capture, the clouds have a single bump on top.

Of course, it's normal for icons to look similar - they're trying to symbolise the same thing - same as different fonts are trying to depict the same letters.

See also: The one, the only, photograph of Earth (2001). https://neil.fraser.name/writing/earth/

Different clouds though, in that picture.

There is only one cloud icon in the entire universe that keeps going back and forth in time. As it is going backwards in time, it appears to us as an anti cloud icon.

Clouds on the Noun Project https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=cloud

I work as a designer, and this golden ratio thing is hilarious. The only designers who consciously use the golden ratio are junior designers eager to find some deep, mystic design rule that will guarantee all their designs to be beautiful.

Everything looks like the golden ratio if you squint hard enough.

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3044877/the-golden-ratio-design...

The same goes for many other icons. Like rss, wifi, and shutdown icon.

It makes sense, because once an icon becomes popular reinventing it with another design makes people confused.

Isn't it different because the RSS, Wi-Fi and Shutdown icon have been designed to represent a protocol and/or system?

The iCloud "cloud" icon was designed to represent a product, which implies other products could/should have found something else.

Apple didn't invent the cloud.

Apple's iCloud icon is a cloud icon. Apple's branding strategy is to hijack and monopolize common words like "apple", a warbof conquest against the English language

Apple's cloud icon has rounded corners.

Article from 2011, but nothing has changed afaik...

You have to check The Simpsons, I bet they did it first

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