The save icon is a floppy disk, even though they became obsolete 20y ago
twitter.com
twitter.com
That's called a "skeuomorph" - when something new takes on the appearance of what it replaced.
No, that's called iconography. The reason why icons are called icons. Skeumorph means something entirely different and only tangentially related.
In the spirit of that twitter thread, though, which I feel must be stolen from someone else because it looks new and I've definitely seen it before, it's fun and exciting to ask yourself the following question though: "If I had to pictorially represent the act of saving the contents of the current document, and upon pain of death I weren't allowed depicting the floppy, how the fuck else would I do it?"
Well, the cheap answer is. . . A hard drive.
But maybe better would be a cube with a circular dial on it. Everyone would get File / safe.
Same concept as the floppy drive though - showing a different thing that already existed.
The classic rectangular block does not even exist anymore in places such as phones, tables, and MacBooks.
Generally, skeuomorphism has been applied to designs which imitate physical objects and the way you interact with them on a screen. Audio plugins are famous for doing this - accurately representing the physical aspect of the hardware elements they emulate.
Using the word to cover "flat design" elements like seen in these logos is new to me, but I guess entirely consistent with the definition of the word.
Some examples of what skeuomorphic design usually refers to:
https://www.designer-daily.com/great-examples-of-skeuomorphi...
Maybe in a few more millennia a square with a smaller rectangle will represent the "S" sound in some future language.
Tanya McCullough’s replies to this thread are also great. I think that identifying the different ways that skeuomorphism is used, as she does, could lead to much more thoughtful and helpful conversations about skeuomorphism.