The New “Save ” Icon | Hacker News Reader

The New “Save ” Icon

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I don't like it, it's just a rotated Save icon. The floppy one is much more iconic and representative imo

All of the other ones in similar style (like "upload" and "download" on that page) have obvious problems with localisation where translated words might not be based on up/down.

I think the ultimate value is in them staying the same: iow, they are learned.

I like the style of this one, and as "save" it's generally ok ("save as" is even great once you know save, though not sure about languages not using ellipsis).

I remember the unreal 1 editor, with apple and dinosaur head icons all around the map. Not because there were apples or dinosaurs in the game, just as representation of scripts and paths. They were totally off-meaning but very recognizable: you saw in a second what was supposed to happen.

I presume the floppy icon is comparable: Visually distinguished from all other icons, so a good icon even if the shape lost its actual meaning

I remember that. As you said, you couldn't guess what they are just from seeing them, but it was easy to remember. Only years later did it dawn on me that the apples might be food that bait the AI. :-)

For the save icon I agree. This "new" icon has to be learned just like the floppy disk already has to be. Nothing about it intuitively tells me what it means. It actually looks similar to the log-in glyphicon that for example bootstrap is using: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/components/

My first impression is that it looks like an "exit" sign. It resembles going through a doorway like this (https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:grs:7010:E002)

The concept of saving to me feels outdated and archaic after the mobile experience has become the primary interaction with computers and has started to migrate into pc. 99.9999% of cases where you mutate a digital artifact you intend that mutation to be persistent in all other cases you’d want a commit/track-change like paradigm rather than the odd: “your changes live in a temporary fragile reality that might break and be forever lost unless you initiate a persists to storage operation”

Why can't we keep the floppy and use icons like these for new functionality that are more appropriate?

There is nothing wrong with the floppy and no, people are not too stupid to learn that it means save.

icons are symbolic representations. They may have started out as representations of physical object but they can become abstracted become conventions. The save icon may have started as an image of a physical disk/disc but by convention it has moved into an abstraction for storing changes.

Taken to an extreme icons can morph from hieroglyphic symbols to alphabetic characters to the point where it can be hard to see what the original object modeled was.

Nice.

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