Windows 98 icons are great (2015)
alexmeub.com
alexmeub.com
For one, we don't have a "start" button anymore, we have a four square thing which you're suppose to just know to click. If I want to get to the control panel I have to erm... Search for it on the four squared menu thing? I'm not even sure there is a "proper" way to navigate there anymore, instead you just need to know there is a thing called the "control panel" and search for it. And even then you're never 100% sure if you want the "control panel" or "settings". And why do these two interfaces have completely different UIs? It's like the whole OS is designed to be as confusing as possible. If I didn't have experience with prior versions of Windows I'm not sure I'd even know how to do the most basic things.
The control panel is depreciated and remains for compatibility reasons and is deliberately hidden in favour of the settings button, which uses the now familiar gear icon.
This is just wrong haha. Here's a raymond chen post:
> But one thing kept getting kicked up by usability tests: People booted up the computer and just sat there, unsure what to do next.
> That’s when we decided to label the System button “Start”.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030722-00/?p=43...
Edit: I hope this comment doesn't come off as rude or anything too :). I just remember reading about this in Raymond's book and the fact that the start menu originally didn't say start stuck out to me.
Microsoft feels that it has no choice but to follow fashion trends and I am not sure that they're wrong to do so. Eventually minimalist UIs will go out of fashion and utilitarian evidence-based UIs may come back. But for now, the fashion is what it is and if companies want new users, they must follow the trend.
Regarding the hodge-podge of different UI designs, I think that that is just a function of UI/UX designers not being honest with themselves and others about whether they're doing engineering, psychology or fashion. Fashion must change for the sake of change but engineering and psychology do not. This creates inconsistencies.
Apparently, Microsoft is way ahead of you.
Each time OS vendors update their UI, they add more white space and make the UI flatter. The old always complain but I just found the new design more comfortable and intuitive to use.
It is a one way trip. I can't get back to old, traditional IDE after trying the more modern VS Code.
I love the W11 design, best looking one so far. Usability is not bad. W7's was better in some regards, worse in others. I hated W10 design. Usability was poor. W7 design was nice. Usability was good. Windows XP design was ugly. Usability was nice. Windows 98 was ugly. Usability was ok for the time.
The others in between are not worth mentioning.
The only semi usable flat theme under *nix it's Zukitre GTK2/3 theme with, maybe, the Newaita icons or similar. Everything else lacks lots of contrast.
Themes are used for borders. Every program has its own UI. Even on MS Windows.
Not acknowledging that other people have other taste that doesn't necessarily match with a person's personal preference is wrong in my opinion.
Unix had brilliant points, too: Virtual desktops and moving/resizing with alt or super_l and clicking the mouse with a left/right mouse click.
Thus, you can use a Unix based WM/DE (IceWM, Mate, XFCE) with the Windows 95 theming (Chicago95) AND the Unix keybindings, having the best of the both worlds since Icewm was created from long ago.
I will just ignore your thick-headed comment from this point, it's clear that you're not arguing in good faith.
Boring sound like a good UI quality to me. I don't want UI to be entertaining and full of surprises, I want a job to be done.
Having worked at many companies over the years I feel like you are giving Microsoft way more credit than it probably deserves.
Politics plays a huge role in decision making, and in my experience, when it comes to UI/UX, politics accounts for 80% or more of choices.
I find it really hard to convince myself that Windows' scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign on top of each other is the result of careful planning and research.
I'm sure they do the research, and look at feedback. I just don't think it has any bearing on decision making.
Separately, I didn't say anything about "careful planning", I only said "research". And that the research is telling them to make the UIs look flat and non-skeuomorphic.
> scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign
No one here claimed that they succeeded ;-)
I also think the fashion theory is wrong. In fact, it’s backward. Younger users didn’t demand these regressions; they’re simply more used to lazy, shitty design and the absence of the visual cues and standards that made GUIs so intuitive in the first place. So, for example, they are more likely to tap or click on a plain text label to see if it’s a control than those of us who expect controls to be demarcated as such. But once those regressions become the norm, the better designs are indeed recognizable as “older.”
Thus we all suffer a decline in design quality. Windows is now an unmitigated UI shítshow.
Fortunately we’re finally seeing some backlash against “flat” (AKA no) design.
I think the goal is very much the same today, but the people first using a computer have probably already experienced Android or iOS. Computers are now for serious business and maybe high-end video games, the rest is done on phones and tablets. The world has gone mobile first so for beginners to pick up Windows, Windows needs to be "mobile-compatible". Icons are flat and abstract, buttons are big without borders, and half your screen being filled with UI is not bad as long as you full screen that important content when it matters.
I don't think the clarity of older operating systems needs to go away per se, but people's expectations have dropped significantly with small touch screen devices and designers love showing off how "clean" their design looks.
Always have been.
Without the ability to hover over an icon with a cursor there's often no way to tell what it will do, and apps usually don't include any help pages.
Copying the mobile UI is definitely a bad direction, but it's a very understandable one from a business sense and it's the only explanation I can really think of when it comes to Windows 11's iconography and design.
Rape is also an experience. A negative one.
And Android or iOS are not computers (just like a TV or a washing machine are not computers). They are specialized entertainment devices designed to extract data from the users.
I was shocked how unintuitive and sometimes insane that software has turned to. It's basically useless. After spending hours trying to sort the emails, we decided to just back them up and delete everything. My friend moved to Gmail.
I wonder what happened? Old Outlook while having some shortcomings was a manageable piece of software, whereas the new one is completely unusable. Other Microsoft software suffer the same problems like Teams. I feel sorry for any workplace that is using any Microsoft software. There are exceptions like VSCode, but given how things work at Microsoft, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode turned into crap nobody wants to use anymore.
They call it the Ribbon. A collections of icons (or as someone said, hyeroglyphs) arranged in who knows what order, which you need to guess what they do. Some have text, some not.
And "Start" has been gone for over 15 years. It transformed into the "Windows logo button" with Vista in 2006. The menu's naming was kept (and still is) but "Start" as text hasn't been a thing for a long time.
"Google and Apple does it so it must be good"
"Tablets and phones are the future."
"Users don't want to be bothered"
"We know better"
Am I strange to tend to like app and OS redesigns if they make things look fresh, even when they might slow me down slightly, or even slow my machine down? I just wanted to be the contrarian voice here. Redesign all you want. It's ok to say "Let's choose just a little bit of form over function here". I usually like the new better than the old. No, Win2000 wasn't the pinnacle of Windows neither in function nor design. There I said it.
It's akin to that office that has no desk because it would ruin the aesthetics. The desk has to be there, your challenge is (should be) to design around the functional requirements.
That being said, designers work with customers and as a former freelance designer I can tell you that wrangling the customer is basically half the job. This is true even in a company setting.
Design is one of those fields where everybody thinks they know what works and everybody thinks they have taste (spoiler alert: they don't). I ultimately stopped working in the field because you literally had to manipulate customers into making okay choices instead of horrible ones and even then you had the occasional CEO just overriding weeks of work with some bullshit idea he had on the shitter.
Everybody blames designers, but designers rarely make the choices that lead to the results everybody sees. Designers just try to get paid.
The designer described how every time they had to show a draft for a stakeholder such as a client or manager, they polished their design and then added some obvious design flaw like making something clearly off-center that should have been centered or similar. Then when they show their initial design, the manager says "Looks good but make that thing centered properly".
If the design had been flawless, the manager would find something else to object to, which would invariably make the design worse. So showing off the imperfect design leads to the perfect outcome: the manager or customer gets to feel like they contributed to the design but the design stays the way the designer intended.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062759/trivia?item=tr1788197
More broadly, it's just political management of assemblies. Most governments do the same with controversial legislation: attach some wildly-outrageous clause to something slightly-less-outrageous, focus opposition on that, then strike it out. You then have the space to pass the bulk of it, which was your real objective all along, while claiming you "listened".
Having said that, at no point do I really believe the role isn't involved in decisions like hiding the randomize button in iphone music player.
Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface. I don't have any idea why you'd look at the attrocity that is win 11 and say it's "beautiful". It's not. It's mostly just empty coloured boxes that don't have any inherent meaning.
A lot of this is simply because the newer designs are based on large screens while Win98/2000 was hampered by the requirement to being readable at 800x600 and 256 colors. Using gradients, negative space and was a luxury not afforded in 2000 but it does help.
I have fond memories of using wxpx64 which was basically w2k3 desktop edition.
I honestly hate how it looks and I think it is fucking ugly.
Yet I still defaulted to switching back to it (back when that was simple, don't think it's an option in win 10 anymore) just because the new one was so anti-functional. It was that bad.
I wouldn't be surprised if many users did once they knew that it was even an option.
Peak of "traditional" while still looking decent was honestly XFCE for me. Since then I went full geek and set up i3 tiling manager with basically workspace/screen per app, as I realized near-everything I do is just "running 2 full screen apps on 2 screens" so I optimized for that.
I just find the look ugly. There is no objectivism in preference to how something looks.
Ugly would be, with no arguing, the first editions of Amiga OS. Look:
http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html
http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga2.html
Windows 95, being designed for 256 colors, looks really fine. Ok, Mac's System 7 it's prettier, without any doubt, but as I said the Amiga OS 1/2.x versions are far worse.
Windows 95 it's boring in the sense of being tied to a corporation based style, with cubicles.
I think what people are trying to do is combine the legibility of Windows 98 design with the juiciness of modern UIs, which as far as I know hasn't been done yet and is why this keeps getting brought up.
It's not strange to like redesigns. But if they slow you or your machine down? Yes, it's strange!
Would you prefer a car that changed every year to a more "fresh" design, but each year make it harder to open the door and would let you go 5(km/m)/h slower? I definitely wouldn't and it's strange that you would, yes.
You mean like in the BMW i8 ? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T-upswNkRqE
I only open the door twice - once to get in, once to get out - so a small nuisance like being harder to open wouldn't bother me as it's only a fraction of the time spent engaging with the car. However I have family members with terrible arthiritis who struggle opening car doors anyway, so it'd definitely be a factor for them.
I'm also not typically in a rush when I'm driving, so if the car is a little slower that doesn't bother me as much as whether I'm comfortable and enjoying the drive. Or even if the car was no more comfortable, but just looked better, I might actually feel some pride in it and that would give me a lift and result in an improvement to my mood. If my goal was to get from A-B as fast as possible though, then it absolutely would bother me.
But I guess we're the minority!
My experience is that regular users hate changes, period. Doesn't matter if it looks much prettier now. The button isn't where it was or changed color and they are now confused.
This is starting to change as more people had computers in a phase of their life where they were happy to experiment. But it will still be many years until the majority of the working population evaluates changes on design and performance criteria instead of just disliking them for being different than before.
Like Windows 11 for some reason centers the buttons on the screen. I'm not quite seeing what that improves since now things move around, and the start button is no longer in the very comfortably reachable corner by default.
A few days ago, a new search bar showed up in Windows 11 and I immediately closed it without trying it in any way. Months ago, I switched to DuckDuckGo because I couldn't disable Google's search result highlighting. I hate the new microwave in our house because it doesn't let me type in seconds and instead I have to push some "Automatic 1" for a fixed 60 second interval (there's probably a better way, but my wife threw away the manual).
Sometimes, better is worse. I am so close to switching to a basic Linux distro like Gentoo just to avoid these surprises.
<citation needed>. I don't think I ever saw anyone say more than "ok it looks kinda neat" and that isn't commentary on "liking" just "well, they changed it and it is not terrible yet".
Most of UI changes in long running software honestly looks like designers (or their managers most likely) trying to excuse their employment than anything acutally useful for the user
Why would you think so? It's not like any vendor goes and asks them about it, before making a UI overhaul.
In my experience - which I recognize is anecdotal - they absolutely hate those changes, even more than professional users, because it's even harder for them to find their bearing again. Non-tech-savvy people in particular don't have the experience and developed mental models to pin-point and describe the sources of their dissatisfaction, so they round it up into "tech sucks" or "my computer is slow, maybe it has viruses, I probably need a new one".
People have nostalgia for 98 and XP, but try to use any software from around that era and it’s the equivalent of riding a bicycle on a highway. Definitely not 5 km/hr slower every year
You and I must use disjoint sets of software then. For me, cloud software is universally slower than legacy software. Good chunk of it is because of the browser. The UI, by default, is jankier and slower for every interaction - to the point I can notice the delay on every click, which for desktop software even 15 years ago was true only when the machine was under large load - not literally all the time.
And that's without considering UI interactions that block on network requests.
And so, I find trivial webapps to be just jankier. For anything serious though, they're near-useless, as the performance drop prevents using the app or, in some cases, slows down the entire machine. 2D raster and vector editors, and 3D modelling software, is still done primarily as desktop apps for a reason.
I purchased a Tesla model 3 in 2019. Adjusting to controlling everything on a tablet in the center of the car was a huge change from every car I had driven previously, but I gradually got used to the UI and memorized the layout. In December 2021, Tesla launched a new UI that moved the buttons around and hid many single tap actions behind multiple taps. It was terrible. The last place I want a redesigned UI is in a car I currently own. They should have only launched the refresh on new models. It wasn’t the main reason I sold the car, but it certainly didn’t help. Big UI changes can be exhausting.
If your artstyle(s) doesn't fit usability patterns, change it or find someone else.
My computer is sort of like a toolshed. There's a workbench. There are some tools hanging up on the walls. There are some storage cabinets.
Whether I designed it or someone else, I'm here to work, and over time I get used to how things are arranged.
If tomorrow I come in and everything is different, it will be difficult for me to find my tools, and my efficiency will be reduced. If the tools are rearranged in a way that makes them permanently less efficient, I may get irate.
It's different if we're talking about the living room or even the bathroom. It's different if it's my casual clothes or the garden.
But my computer is none of those things, it is my workstation. And if anything gets in the way of that, I get rid of it and find a replacement.
Thinking a bit about this though, say Microsoft could argue that the toolshed isn't really yours. That you're merely renting/"licensing" it and they reserve the right to rearrange their tools at a whim, and they usually won't touch tools you own. I don't know how to counter-argue this though.
You can see it in the language used in UI design these days. It's all about user experience and their journey. Not much about what they want to actually do with help from software.
This is exactly the case, and why I don't use their toolshed anymore.
And while we are into ending a post with random opinion statements, yes, 2k was the pinnacle of Windows design.
All I can think about is the Windows 10 Calculator. Prior to Windows 10, you could type Windows Key + R, Calc, and immediately type my equation. Amazing for when you're in the middle of a meeting and just need to calculate something right away.
But now it's a stupid app that takes a few seconds to load regardless of how fast your computer is. Needless bloat which seemed to have only only made things look pretty.
Gallery of screenshots
Honestly, the cd player is quite understated there...
Relevant: demo of this in Computer Chronicles' Windows 98 episode: https://youtu.be/N3s0_yf2mS4?t=1022
Is there a Gnome or KDE theme or clone inspired by Windows 2000? Windows 8, 10, and 11 are simply offensive in comparison. I kept and open mind but still haven't come around to liking any version, not even close to W2K.
Edit: jeroenhd, this is superb, thank you for sharing! Also the BMW 7-series from 1998-1999 was one of the best ever. Every subsequent one isn't nearly as good, IMO.
I've run variants of this: https://b00merang.weebly.com/desktop-themes.html on GNOME for quite some time, without putting in the effort to recreate the start menu. My coworkers definitely looked at me weird for my Windows XP theme but it felt very nostalgic. Small details are off, though, unless you go in manually and tweak the CSS even further to correct for the differences between the author's DE and yours.
For LXDE, this project: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 goes further than just a theme, restyling some common utilities as well. It's not Windows 95, but if you'd told me it was designed around that time I would've believed you.
This post: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/tijkr3/plasma_wel... shows a very good KDE Plasma theme. Some icons are Win98, though, so you may need to replace those for the authentic look and feel.
What I myself would love is for someone to make a proper Windows 7 Aero theme for Linux. The icon sets and the backwards compatibility themes are available everywhere, but there's no Aero theme that's not jarring. In a perfect world, I'd like the frosted glass effect as well, but that's probably too much to ask. I've thrown some Windows DLLs into Ghidra to try and find the frosted glass theme engine code, but I had no idea where to look and couldn't find anything.
Windows 2000 will always be my favorite Windows, but XP with Watercolor is the best looking, imho.
0 - https://www.deviantart.com/alecu222/art/Watercolor-4-3-Visua...
I wonder sometimes just how much effort went into manually hinting it at all the standard UI sizes to make it pixel-perfect.
Every six months or so I look for the ability to skin Windows 10 to look like this, or like Windows Classic at least. It seems to be largely impossible.
Coincidentally "Professional" was a code name for the theme, I guess making Luna "Home"? Glad there's a signed copy: https://archive.org/details/winxp-watercolor
#!/bin/sh
export GTK_NO_OVERLAY=1
On theming: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
It works best with Ubuntu Mate. With Ubuntu Gnome it will work but not so integrated.
Try setting up alt + right click, or windows + right click to resize the windows. I have AltDrag installed on Windows, and I can grab my windows anywhere to move or resize.
I always felt like the Win98 icons were subpar because they didn't have a consistent perspective and the shading was unnecessary and not very well done. Everything is shaped like flat surfaces but shaded as if it's rounded and bulge-y.
The Mac System 7 icons were what made me fall in love with icon design. There are so crisp and legible, and create a consistent metaphor and perspective that spans the entire desktop and glues it together. And they still manage to have a little charm and warmth.
I think the popularity of music streaming services has made it so easy to try and find new (new to them) music, that people continue to discover forever now.
but that's the best part!!
You can try an online emulator to rekindle that nostalgic feeling... https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-wo...
I think I only recognise it immediately because I was involved with Web development when that thing came along, but to this day I always end up having to help someone, even tech people, finding some menu when browsing the web together.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/
Compare these to the AWS icon set, which are just lines on a single-color square: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/
current icon set used by AWS is way better than the "3D" icons they had earlier
I think having "lines on a square" can also be converted to SVG.
In fact AWS page you linked does have an "Assets Package" download that included both PNG and SVG icons for both light and dark backgrounds.
the "single-color square" is actually a gradient fill too -- whether that is better is subjective.
I have always felt the need for an API that serves the correct icon in chosen resolution and format. we recently saw a HN post that argued that architecture diagrams should be code. this would be one necessary step towards that.
Nowadays we're getting weird trend to either monochromatize or outright abstract icons that can't be easily associated with a thing. When we had 256 colors and tiny amount of pixels developers used every single one of them, now we have millions and get colorful squares
This picture says it all:
https://i.imgur.com/jaXMYHr.png
I also hate the minimalism of small greyish singe-color outline icons, where everything looks the same, and you don't know what it does... a grey square? A stop button? Oh no, it shows the list of already open apps... circle with an outline? Yep, everybody thinks "home" (button) when they see a circle... etc.
And Microsoft copies from Google. What can be worse than that ?
Try adding a `* {image-rendering: 'pixelated'}` in dev tools and you can see these icons in their true glory.
Pixelated rendering is closest to the design intent IMO.
Not saying I think their UI is perfect, but perhaps we'd see people feel a lot more familiar/comfortable with their computers, and perhaps it would also have inspired future generations not to constantly redesign things. Just as Apple became an inspiration for designers; it could have been the other side of that coin.
It's fun to think about.
I remember buying the very first iPad for my mom. One thing that she really liked was that huge, prominent physical button that you could press to immediately go to the home screen. No matter which app she ended up in and how confusing it was, the safe place was always there within easy reach. It made her that much more confident to actually go and explore.
Now, she's supposed to slide from the bottom edge, I suppose. Except if you don't do it vigorously enough, it doesn't actually bring you home. But, hey, the gadget is now 15mm shorter!
https://winuxinfocenter.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/deskto...
Why 98? Same icons on 95 were they not?
No argument that the Windows UI has gone massively downhill with each successive release. But hey, if they make it complicated enough, needing to add/remove programs in 3-4 different places, maybe you'll search for everything with Cortana and then they can track and guide you into their own services.
No. Iirc 98 have more colors and better resolutions.
Also, back then Windows came not only with printed manuals, but also with an actually useful help system and not one that just makes a Bing search.
<Windows>+R, then write "calc", press <Return> and you'll be ready to use the calculator. Very intuitive.
A pretty desktop background and a prompt would go a long way.
I'm now picturing something like ChatGPT (or a specifically trained model) integrated into the shell, so a user can simply type / vocalise what they are trying to do, without knowing specific app details, rather than having to navigate a bloated UI.
Also, there is also a "discoverable" way to launch programs keyboard-only: <Windows>, P, A, C (Programs - Accessories - Calculator).
I just really dislike the Windows 10 start menu search. It slows down on random occasions just often enough to be too annoying for me to use, at least on my machine.
It's also a solution to a self-inflicted problem. Super-crowded Start menus were a problem, but not a very widespread one among people who aren't nerds. The Windows 11 Start menu is crowded but largely because it's littered with Microsoft's own apps. If I were to take out Xbox, Alarms & Clocks and all the other crap I no longer bother to uninstall because it's gonna come back on the next update anyway, I could probably use it quite comfortably.
That's not true, the start menu tree was usually relatively clutter-free until the XP era, where companies went absolutely insane and started putting things like manuals and links to the website inside of the start menu tree... yuck!
Big lolz.
Typing to start apps is one of those things that separate the general population from nerds.
Nowadays "you", as in "the general population", start an app from a visual shortcut on your desktop, taskbar, or start menu. Same as before.
Not me, I installed 3rd party application launchers on older versions of Windows. Those were nice and lightweight without the slowdowns of what Microsoft inflicted on everyone.
This works on 1% of the cases because MS decided that you want to search the internet.
98's icons are yet another set, which in my opinion are closer to the spirit of the 95 icons.
I generally agree that modern attempts to "unify" the design of icons usually go to far, but if you think Windows 98 icons are strictly better than say Windows 11 icons, that seems like rose coloured glasses to me.
The good ones are good, but the bad ones are worse. Although I do understand the appeal, and subjectively I do like them better.
How confusing they are has more to do with the complexity of the operation they symbolize than the design of the icon itself.
Naming is hard. Symbolizing is hard. Normalizing operations is not hard. I don't blame modern icons. I blame poor abstractions driven by marketing becoming the norm.
Nevertheless, the real issue is more that "saving" isn't really something you do any more; almost all apps now autosave and restore on restart, such that the real action that needs an icon isn't "save"; it's the option you get when you indicate you'd like to close an open, but unnamed project/document without quitting the application: "give this project/document a name."
Personally i never made the association until almost 2 decades after using computers with radio button elements, despite growing up having a monochrome TV that had actual "radio buttons" (or TV buttons in that case, which probably helped to avoid the association :-P).
And most people know what a phonograph/gramophone is without ever seeing one in person. I don't think a floppy icon will confuse anyone if they know it is for saving and is consistently used as the "saving icon", regardless of if they've seen a real floppy disk or not :-).
Also i think those might be on their way out, the last fan i bought had a touch buttons (not screen) - and yeah, i often did mis-tap the button i wanted :-/
It is just something you will learn interacting to after using computer for some time.
The custom representation for that icon is "an arrow pointing into a half-opened folder".
I show it to my wife (who's just 5 years younger), and she's like: "No.".
[1]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/win98-icons-1.png
[2]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/project-windows98-icons.png
Two computers connected by a pipe of sorts. The computers are two different colors, immediately telling you they are two separate entities (not a clone).
The pipe has a bright yellow notch.
Just perfection, damn! I wonder where the team is now and what they're designing. Anyone know?
I was definitely around when all we had were 32x32 ICOs and "Windows Classic" (RIP).
All of these look old as hell now.
What's interesting is that while Windows 2000 is completely unrecognizable from Windows 11 (mmc, winver, and devmgmt.msc aside), OS X Jaguar looks and feels the same as macOS Ventura (System Prefs aside), just way more skeumorphic. Same with iOS (it basically hasn't changed since iOS 7).
I think that's a testament to how insanely talented the designers at Apple are/were.
Haven't used OS X since Mojave, but compared to Jaguar, there are no scrollbars, the interface is designed more for a trackpad instead of a mouse. The peak for OS X in my opinion was the Panther/Tiger/Snow Leopard era.
Recently I have noticed that I am also beginning to struggle seeing the window borders in Windows 10. If design trends continue I may also soon be unable to operate my laptop :-(. I appreciate that MacOS hasn't gone as crazy as Window.
But I guess the most important thing is that it doesn't offend its designer's taste. I will try to resize those damn things again and again.
Still sucks for users if they only see it rendered at half that size for menu or a reduced size taskbar. Or if it relies on color contrast without consideration for color blindness. Some designers aren't thoughtful enough to check.
By the way, Windows 98 icons are Number-Two for me, the real Number-One top were Windows 3.11 icons.
Out of the box, the extra window title height took up too much room, ugh. But then now there's so much whitespace everywhere.
Win2K was the first one for which I've heard about it personally, probably because that's when it started to show up en masse in developed markets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Product_Activation
Let's rephrase @endgame's comment as "Windows XP and Office XP were the first versions of their respective series where product activation was mandatory on all retail editions." Point still stands I guess.
8 gutted the Windows theme engine because most of it wasn't needed to render flat squares and it still has yet to recover.
And one more click to disable the XP-style control panel.
OTOH app compatibility in XP was quite a bit better, esp. with games. IIRC that's when Windows first started to experiment with features like virtualized disk and registry writes?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18953542 (358 comments)
Some good nuggets of timeless insights.
In comparison, 1998 was 25 years ago, and that did feel like it was a long time.
In any case, you would want a supporting label to really convey the meaning.
While I love to see these sorts of icons in personal sites and projects, the reality is that if I presented icons like these to a client for a SaaS app in 2023, I'd be sent back to the drawing board. No serious business wants their UI to look like it just stepped out of the 90's.
Then you've got Irix icons, and probably on the last place, Solaris CDE.
1. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=beos+icons&iax=images&ia=im...
I always assumed the latter because it feels like a “we need to be different but throw a tiny bit of shade while we’re at it.”
https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-inf...
Now I'm curious what Microsoft did Between 1984 and 1995. Time to go boot up Windows 3.1.
Also check out C:\WINDOWS\system32\moricons.dll for even older icons.
Everything is so sterile and “modern” as others have mentioned.
"Ah but hieroglyph icons of today scale better!" Well, hieroglyph icons of today scale consistently, but remember the icon designers back in the day would make different sizes of each icon to be clearly recognizable at all scales (the whole point of the .ico format!), and to me that is way better than what we have now.
Actually I doubt this. But the very simple, dumb icons probably scale more cleanly.
Look at those Windows 3.1/95/98/ME/2K/XP/Vista/7 icons: They have character. You try and tell me they didn't have fun drawing the icons for MS Agent and Dr. Watson; the fun and sense of humor the devs and artists had making them just ooze out.
Modern day hieroglyphs? They aim to not confuse or offend anyone, and end up impressing noone. They aim to speak all languages and end up speaking nothing. They aim to inform everyone and end up informing noone.
Immense character; there were Easter eggs when you zoomed in on any one of those icons. Now everything is a flat dreary mess.
They look nice and skeumorphic. Flat design is just lazy design and makes things hard for users.
My parents no longer understand what's a button and what isn't. They find modern desktops really confusing.
I hate modern desktops so much I just pretend they don't exist and run bare X with tiled windows, usually one only and fullscreen.
I would disagree as to the supposed 'aims'. Most flat designers don't aim to do anything - they just kept mindlessless repeating the mantra of 'minimalism' to the point where everything looks the same.
Your use of the word 'hieroglyphs' I think is very apt - because that's what they are: hieroglyphs, and NOT icons, as earlier versions of Windows had them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow
MOOF!!!
https://github.com/mdomlop/retrosmart-icon-theme/blob/master...
Instead of replacing them with vague minimalist symbols.
Gradients on buttons to make them appear rounded and clickable are dead these days. Nothing suggests the maximize/minimize/close buttons are buttons anymore other than being abstract looking symbols that are otherwise out of place (at least until you hover over them).
Hiding all scrollbars is totally the trend these days, so the only way to know that something is scrollable is either by trying to scroll it, or noticing cut off content. If the window is sized just right so no content is cut off, it is easy to not realize scrolling is even possible until you eventually do it accidentally.
Those sorts of icons just don't fit into this type of usability harming hyper minimalism that was largely intended to save precious screen space on small mobile devices, but which are simply moronic on full sized computers. sigh
except i doubt that's the entire story, because even though pixel art doesn't scale well, you could make very nice, detailed, inspired, responsive vector graphics using SVG, which would scale up or down to any size. but that probably would cost way too much money to produce, so we're now in the era where companies have brazenly embraced 'phoning it in' as an aesthetic (e.g. material icons, bootstrap, font awesome, etc.). so far, users have either put up with it, or have been tricked into embracing it too
[0] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon...
[0] http://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsiv...
Folks look at the cool designs from that era (and late '90s Windows) and want them back. You can't have that and $0.99 apps. If you try to get that kind of design with today's design budgets, you get exactly the kind of Y2K photo app skeumorphic design that everyone hated.
The hieroglyphic-style icons remain sharp and distinct at most resolutions and densities. You also need to keep in mind the icon sets you mentioned (Material etc) are meant to be used by third parties. They're sort of indistinct and non-offensive because they're supposed to work with a site's branding. The icons are not supposed to be a site's branding. Windows' icons were part of the Windows product branding.