Microsoft Fluent UI System Icons

> A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329

I'd lay the blame on Kai's power tools and their silly opaque discoverable interfaces. That's the start point of usability taking a back seat to designer bs.

Vector graphics can have colors...

> Vectorized icons on the other hand take up much less memory and can auto-scale to different displays and use-cases.

In the absence of grid-fitting and hinting, monochrome vector icons are just as mediocre at scaling to arbitrary sizes as colored vector icons. However, I think one "advantage" is that fuzzy monochrome borders look less bad than fuzzy outlined borders.

TTF bytecode supports grid-fitting and hinting (I believe SVG doesn't support it), and it would be interesting to see that applied to rescalable icons. However, you'd have to turn off subpixel antialiasing.

Is the trade-off worth it? Is saving developer time worth more than saving user time?

Fonts are not the gold standard. They have some advantages (mostly convenience of bundling) and some disadvantages (reliability/compatibility, and functionality). One of the disadvantages is that they’re much more likely to simply not load—fonts are supposed to be optional, and most browsers have a “don’t use the fonts the web page specifies, use my own set of fonts” setting. And the other huge disadvantage is that you’re mostly limited to monochrome icons (styleable multi-coloured text support in the one file is somewhere between non-existent and patchy, can’t remember exactly where). Overall, I’d consider one of the inline SVG variants to be the gold standard in terms of functionality and compatibility, though optimal developer ergonomics require some sort of build tool.

Why do some have horizontal bars, and some vertical? And if it is meaningless, why is it part of the icon?

I'd say that's nostalgia talking. These are awful.

Also don't underestimate your visual memory, most of these don't mean anything to me compared to the "bad" icons of today.

Iconography can work outside the context in which it arose when it is sufficiently ubiquitous and new users learn it as an abstract shape instead of a nmemonic for the physical world.

I think that the 3.5 diskette will have staying power since the trend in applications is to constantly persist. The icons needed have shifted to SCM-like commit, branch, fork, diff, merge, revert. However, these are conceptually very abstract compared to "Save."

The main benefit here is not in how accurate the metaphor is today, but how consistently it is used. Save looked roughly the same in the 90s as it does today, across operating systems, across applications, and it's instantly recognizable. Perhaps what's a good comparison is traffic signs: no entry has very little metaphorical meaning but it's universally known and understood.

I’ve started using the cloud icon with an arrow for save (fa-cloud-upload), implying “this information is being uploaded to the cloud”. No complaints.

> but the floppy disk metaphor is about three technological phases out of date. It's as if a magneto crank were offered to represent "call."

The phone icon used everywhere depicts a corded type (without the cord) that was last popular in the 90s. After that there was a wireless version, then flip-phones, then smartphones.

So actually about the same number of iterations out of date.

> why hasn't a better, more general icon representing the concept of persisting something emerged?

Icons are good at representing objects but terrible at representing behavior over time unless it's simple directional movement. How would you symbolize something like the concept of persistence? "Data that can be retrieved unchanged in the future"? A pen, a clock with progression arrows on the hands, and reading glasses? Surely not if there's already an established convention available. The floppy disk happens to be that convention, as the last object that was unambiguously connected to local storage (an optical disk would be ambiguous for recorded music consumption, HDD were supposed to be invisible to the regular user and USB sticks could just as well be any of a variety of radio interfaces in the same form factor). So floppy disk it is. And it's not a problem at all that the convention, once established, is now used by generations that have never seen a floppy, it's just visual language to them. Complaining about the lack of connect between that language and the life realities of it's users seems to me as pointless as complaining that the word dog does not sound like barking at all (why not whoofwhoof?) or that the word hammer does not sound like the noise of hammering (why not banger?).

And still, the floppy disk icon is in decline, because applications that eschew local storage tend to use the "arrow up to cloud" icon. Another convention that has absolutely nothing to do with what is actually going on (few datacenters are actually hidden in clouds)

It's kind of the same reason people will call something a "tape" when they mean a "audio/video recording". Or they "wire" you money. Or that welfare is paid with "food stamps" (it actually comes on a card now).

Certain legacy methods and technologies just carry on in the vernacular because it's easier to make analogies to them long after they become obsolete.

> When did paper planes become "send"?

I guess it was the standard instant messaging system in grade school?

The new Gimp icons are fine for experienced users (like myself) who only need a faint pointer to the function if the tool. I use shortcuts for most of them anyway.

But users who are only starting to learn the ropes the classic big and colorful icons are a serious help. They are still available, just not made the default.

So many pixels are wasted on the goofy super magnified trends of today. I really wish we weren't so wasteful of screen space, most of the time.

I'm not saying that we should all aim for maximum information per pixel or anything, just that we not be wasteful like what I've seen recently. It's maddening.

In Windows 95-98, toolbar icons were grayscale until you hover on them. It was a good idea.

This justification makes no sense to me. Icons aren't window dressing, they serve an actual functional purpose (identifying things that you can click on to perform actions). Removing color and making them all look similar makes them worse at their intended functional purpose.

Not if you want your UI to look the same across platforms, but still look like it "fits" in wherever. One is free to use SF symbols specifically on Apple devices if they want, or if they want it to look the same on Android, Apple devices, web, etc. they can use these icons (or some other icon library).

There's room for both "stock" icons and alternatives.

When I'm quickly trying to find a bookmark, it's easier for me to find the ones with distinctive colors. I've actually rearranged my bookmarks toolbar at times just to get better separation between similarly-colored favicons. So IME there is a singificant advantage to having memorable colors to the icons; they're easier to find.

The point of icons is to recognize them. These icons are insanely similar to each other, which is in direct opposition to that original goal.

A similar disaster were the new gimp tool icons:

https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/images/2.10-icon-themes.p...

They actually brought the old ones back as an option.

> Symbols like we see that indicate male vs female gendered bathrooms

That we recognize a gendered stick figure on a door to mean "this is a toilet" is not less arbitrary than the "WC" signs you see in Europe, which at least have some meaning ("water closet", olde timey for "toilet")