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I'm going to disagree.

I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones), as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!).

I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meaning into the layout and flow of the application. You actually have to pick out a nice, meaningful spot to put the button, and make sure it makes sense in the context, and make sure users can discover it easily. Compare that to an open source application that just throws a bright green plus sign at the end of a row of icons and expects you to know what it does.

> I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones),...

I don't think anyone's disputing that you can do colorful icons poorly, but that's not an argument against them as a concept.

> ...as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!).

One of the cardinal sins of modern UX is fixing things that aren't broken, often just as you were getting used to the last "fix."

> I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meaning into the layout and flow of the application. You actually have to pick out a nice, meaningful spot to put the button, and make sure it makes sense in the context, and make sure users can discover it easily.

Nothing's stopping a designer from doing that with colorful icons.

I think the real reason for flat, monochrome icons is designers prioritizing the overall visual look/style of an application over its usability. It's almost like a less extreme version of designing a "computer interface" for a movie.

I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like.

I'm currently dealing with software that uses old style icons and menus and users just thoroughly do not understand the interfaces. The problem is that when every icon is brightly colored and bold, none of them are meaningful to the user. They all look equally important even when not.

We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to!

> I would argue that we are not "fixing things that aren't broken". Technology is being adopted by more and more people. It should make sense that we find ways to make improvements to reach more and more users. I think software people run the real risk of designing interfaces only they like.

What I meant by that comment is redesigning interfaces for aesthetics reasons: skeuomorphism is out, now skeuomorphism is in, now it's out again. Whitespace is out, whitespace is in. Google has a new icon set out so now our icons are "out of date," etc.

Furthermore, there are real costs to obsoleting users' expertise with an existing interface, and those costs may not be outweighed by marginal improvements in a new design. Also expert users and beginning/casual users have very different needs, and I think there's often too much focus on beginners.

> We're finding with flat, simpler icons we have a lot more control about making certain icons more important than others. We can still give them color! And it will be more meaningful! We can make them pop out when we need to!

And that totally makes sense and I agree with it. What I disagree is rejecting color and depth in an interface for reasons of aesthetics, ideology, or fashion.

It is interesting. I will need to check sources (Samir Zeki's vision book is amazing), but color detection happens way sooner in the v2/v3 region than symbol interpretation which is a higher level function. This is why stop signs are red, traffic lights are not icons (even if distance wasn't a concern, icon based traffic lights would take too long for human vision system to process). Evolutionarily, certain colors such as red indicate threat, injury, decay or food (blood) and we're hardwired to detect it effortlessly and within 100 ms or so. Before the interpretation (v4/v5/limbic system) happens. Baring color blindness concerns, monochrome iconography is objectively worse in every way except for the reasons I'll discuss below.

If you study mission critical systems, even a fork lift, colors are everywhere. EMO button is red. CNC control panels have lots of colors.

The reason why we use flat symbols (recylcing symbol on a milk jug, hazard labels on chemicals, bathroom symbols and airport signs, and road signs) is a practical consideration about printability and ease of application (single printing ink, stencils ), color fastness in the sun, etc. It's not for the reasons you're alluding to, although some of those concerns are orthogonally valid - layout should be logical and flow should be intuitive. Color icons are far superior, if someone can publish a scientific study, I would bet on it with real money. They might be ugly, not against brand/identity/etc. but I am strictly speaking of their utility.

But you can do colors with icon fonts! In fact, one of their benefits is that you can do context specific colors. So only have things be red or green when it's most meaningful.

I think the problem is in having all icons be bright and meaningful all the time - too much visual information can be worse than too little.

I guess I don't understand this critique because with a monochrome iconset, I can style them to have the semantic color that's relevant at the time.

A dangerous or destructive operation can be made to be red, to indicate the danger of the action.

A primary action that I expect the user to do can be made a primary action color.

If the icons are _built_ with color, then I can't change the color based on the semantics of how the icon is used. If you give me a monochrome icon that I can style, then I can match the color to the placement and functionality of the icon.

So, yes, _in the application_ the icons shouldn't be monochrome. But in the _iconset_ I would generally prefer they be.

I also think that "instant universal recognizability" is only one potential reason to use icons, and a fairly limited one. It's also great to have fairly abstract icons in a particular application that are used consistently within that application, so that people can use them as a mnemonic.

> But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones)

Exactly! Survivorship bias is great, we get to only pick the examples that we know were good enough to survive! Why on earth would we want to have a truly random sample that gave us a whole bunch of terrible icons we'll ditch within 3 years?

On the one hand, I absolutely agree with you. I tremendously lament the fact that outline, color, and shading have been thrown out so now we're trying to decipher little rounded-box hieroglyphics based on lines being subtly different.

But on the other hand, the problem is that icons took so much work to create before, and also because they had such a recognizable identity/brand they weren't easy to reuse. Now the icons are so generic that they might as well be letters of the alphabet. They kinda are. A right-arrow is just a right-arrow -- it's not a Microsoft Office style right-arrow, or Windows 95 style right-arrow, or Mac Aqua style right-arrow, etc.

These icon fonts make sense for when the icon is meant to be essentially decorative typography -- e.g. a share icon next to the word "share" or an "opens in new tab" link arrow. They work very well for websites.

However, I hate these icon fonts when they're used without a text label besides them -- specifically in toolbars. That's where I wish desperately we could go back to colorful textured icons that were easy to tell apart. Even after years, I still find Gmail's toolbar of monochrome blob icons to be entirely unusable for this reason.

FYI there is a setting in gmail that turns the mystery icons into text labels: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2473038?hl=en-GB

Thank you for this!

Wow it never even occurred to me there would be a setting for that.

Thanks!!

Bizarrely, it changes the buttons to text _only_. Not a glyph plus caption.

A glyph plus text is more recognisable and explanatory than either.

Yes, it attaches a particular theme/brand/aesthetic to iconography. I think we should push designers to do the due diligence and not just get something from material.io and dump it in the app. It won't happen because $$$, ship ship ship and MVP culture, agile, etc.

Careful, meticulous, rigorous, disciplined, thoughtful work is old fashioned.

We produce broken, shitty apps because early feedback culture, not finishing things, market validation, the entire startup culture, etc. I see benefits in this but also negatives. Remember when SEGA games were shipped 100% complete and almost bug free? That's unheard of these days. They had no way to know if the game is going to be successful. No early access. They took risks.

Most designers can create a good icon. Or two. But a cohesive set of one fifty is going to have a few that are not so good. And some that are outright crap.

If a designer is designing icons, the designer is probably solving the wrong problem. Either because the "client" doesn't know what the right problem is. Or because designing icons is more for the designer than solving the right problem.

Icons are hard because...well, all the reasons a floppy disk is the standard save icon. What I mean is that designers will default to their own experience and a floppy disk was it when the first sticky save icon was designed.

Now it means save. A designer who wants to change the floppy disk is solving the wrong problem.

I discussed this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26332553

I agree with you. We should take advantage of existing historical context such as the floppy save icon. This is what the Fam Fam Fam icon set does. The main issue is not to redesign them, but to design them in such a way that it is recognizeable. You can design floppy disk in many ways to fit your design aesthetic. Just that it should not be confused with 10 other icons. If you use monochrome line graphics, its hard to tell instantly.

What is it with HN being so hostile towards design?

So many smart designers are carefully considering how to make genuinely ideal interfaces.

But fuck them, they're just too lazy to put effort into complex interfaces, they're just following trends. They don't know what there doing. But Winamp-Themes where you can barely even see the buttons - yes, those are great.

Sure, mistakes are made, and overcorrections happen. Everyone was tired of skeuomorphism a while ago (ironically, OP seems to have forgotten that). The response was a vast overcorrection and we're still recovering from that. But if you honestly think that we're off worse now, then I can only shake my head.

(EDIT) But why is this hostility so prevalent in the developer demographic? Apparentlyy everyone else is okay. (unless you want to argue that there is some secret designer cult that imposes their will on everyone). Is it age? Are we just damaged from looking at a terminal too much?

It's sort of the default state of assumption about the world in my opinion. "Everyone is an idiot except me" makes the world incredibly simple - frustrating, but simple. "Other people are incredibly bright and talented" is a scarier thought at a first look, plus it's vastly more complex because then the second question: "Why are there still problems in the world" arises instantly.

Personally I think it's wildly comforting and explanatory to assume other people (typically) know better than I do. Means I can focus on my little corner of the world and I don't need to tear it all down and rebuild it. Design, fashion, modern art; there are loads of domains engineers tend to assume are full of idiots - and yet we don't seem to dominate them like you'd assume we would if they were, indeed, full of idiots.

> Google services icons? All impossible to tell apart now.

Google went for maximum idiocy when they tried to use logos to serve two distinct roles: branding and utility. Which is why they look like complete unreadable ass.

They forgot the simple fact that if you want branding, logos must look unique. And if you want utility, icons must be representative. It's a classic case of wanting impossible design. I suspect there were no actual designers involved in the top-level direction at all. I've certainly done worse things for a paycheck.

Seems like they went with branding at the expense of utility. Not sure they were trying to do both.

> when they tried to use logos to serve two distinct roles: branding and utility.

But you can do this. MS Office has done so one way or another for decades - the icons in the product family have similar, distinctive design language, but each also clearly conveys which product it is with shape, colour, and a clear letter logo.

I think most UI and industrial design has regressed a lot in recent years. Two big issues are:

1. Obsession with "minimalism" and "clean design". Taken to the extreme by Jony Ive, where we started fearing what else Apple would take away in new revisions of their hardware and software. Scrollbars disappeared, buttons started blending into the background or becoming invisible, everything was "clean", utterly undiscoverable, and annoying to use. It only looked good in the keynote demo.

2. Fashion. Designers love following other designers and fashion trends run rampant. That's why on our phones we are beginning to get a bunch of icons that all look the same, every one is an abstract geometric pattern using at least 4 saturated colors. And we can't tell them from one another.

I am so hoping for a reversion of both trends. You don't have to design like everybody else!

Minimalism has a place — esp. with reduced screen real-estate. An icon I would display in my tool bar or on a button is different than an icon I would display on the desktop.

My beef with Google's icons is the seeming random decision to use rounded miters on some art, sharp miters on others. Very mish-mash.

> reduced screen real-estate

Don't get me started on how much space we waste on any UI these days. Apart from HN UI, pretty much every website and desktop app has wastage of space.

I suspect, we stopped using borders - thanks to minimalism, that we need to use copious amounts of negative space to separate them. So, now paddings and margins are liberally applied everywhere.

Another reason is that we design websites for mobile users primarily, which requires more spacing due to touch input. And it's easy to just leave it in there for the desktop as well. It's also often more visually pleasing at first glance, even though it's less functional.

I got to say that HN does not provide a nice mobile experience in my opinion. I've clicked the wrong link many times due to lack of white space. However I agree that a lot of sites add way too much spacing between everything.

> Apart from HN UI, pretty much every website and desktop app has wastage of space.

By HN, do you mean Hacker News? Because it has whitespace on the sides (since the <table> element has width of 85%). It still looks fine if you change it to 90 or 95, so one could argue there's wasted space there too.

But I'm not that one. I recognize empty space has its place in design. And it's not a fad either. Pick up a book - any book - and you will notice plenty of negative space there. Borders are used sparingly, if at all.

Books have a purpose for negative space on either side of the text. It's to allow you to hold it without obscuring the text. It is also to allow spine to be tightly bound.

For reference, here is a good book that goes in-depth of what and whys of book design, it is hard to find it though: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Books-Practice-Jost-Hochuli...

Most negative space on the websites is merely designers going "it looks clean".

What's wrong with a design being clean? Normally that's high praise!

It's not just for the practical purpose. Jan Tschichold writes: "Two constants reign over the proportions of a well made book: the hand and the eye." Indeed, large margins give a feeling of quality, luxury, and openness. Compare older books with spacious margins to tight ones in modern books so as much text can be crammed to save on printing.

Here's another reference about page margins: https://practicaltypography.com/page-margins.html

"The pleasure of reading an effectively designed document will soon outweigh the unfamiliarity of extra white space around the edges."

Ok, your comment made me open the site instead of just taking a glance at the comments and moving on.

When I got there, the icons were... actually not that bad. They have very diverse outlines (even more than your example), large features (again, more than your examples), and very precise meanings. Why do you say they are hard to tell apart?

The only thing missing is color and gradients, but that is for good reason, as hard-coded colors do interfere with usability and accessibility, and currently we have no way to encode color independent gradients (that's a huge oversight, by the way).

You seem to be confusing these Google Font icons with app icons (Google services, macOS dock icons). The former are meant to be simple, resizeable, used by other apps, work in dark/light mode, and able to be part of any design language. Compare them with Apple's SF Symbols.

Not an expert in this. In some fundamental way, icons have a specific function. To convey action, or status, etc in a small compact graphical form. Semiologically, photoshop tools palette icons and app icons are functionally the same. They are both used to perform an action whether that’s to select a tool or launch an app.

Edit: one key thing I forgot about iconography - familiarity. The floppy disk icon is ubiquitously understood for historic reasons.

I am going to heavily agree. The current set of useless garbage is not different from the next. And any and all creativeness is sirens in copying and being like apple and google.

The flat abstractions are garbage that only a selected few understand. Instead of being a language that is representative of something, literally the meaning of "icon", it is a flat 2d projections of a 3d shape in a 2 color scheme.

A floppy disk became the icon for saving because it represented "write to disk". Now, it would be a square in the name of flat ness and easy to read or some other optimization. This is not to be conflated with survivorship bias.