macOS Icon History

You see this a lot in the absurd “modernist” design of clean lines, sharp edges, and lack of texture and depth across all industries.

Whether that’s your Thuma furniture where the price is high and your marketed to be told that the design is good, but it’s not at all - devoid of meaning and a sense of place, never mind that the quality of the materials are low and have no specific origin, or your run of the mill drone light show where we are fooling ourselves into thinking that drawing pictures of things like the Statue of Liberty (oh after the drones do the ads, brought to you by your local auto dealer) are good and should be appreciated instead of the vibrancy and brilliance of fireworks instead.

Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there. Look at the Calculator app as a great example.

They say perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. But there is a point where you take away more and more and more and your left with creations devoid of meaning or purpose.

Once you start seeing this in your day to day life you can’t unsee it. Sorry ahead of time for those who read this comment and become more attune to this phenomenon.

Note that, in this UX-design paradigm, the icon on (in?) a button still can be its own standalone object of arbitrary shape, rather than being forced to be button-shaped itself (see e.g. the Stickies or Game Center icons in TFA.) But that standalone object has to then be "encased" in the "app button" glass (as if encasing something in a puck of pourable resin), to make it visually obvious that this object is functionally a button, rather than just being some random 3D object with its own arbitrary interaction semantics.

Funny enough, this is almost exactly the complement to the problem of visually differentiating action buttons from 2D content. In a 2D UI, you want to make the action buttons more 3D-looking than the 2D stuff around them, to help them stand out. Thus the Windows XP / macOS 9 era of "jelly" buttons with that visually bulge toward the screen — standing proud of the content, affording touch.

But if everything is 3D / stands proud in arbitrary ways, then overlaid actions will stand out better if they're less 3D — making it clear that they're sitting "on the HUD" rather than "in the world." Such objects can be literal 2D — or you can get fancy and choose some unusual middle-ground, like the sort of 2.5D papercut-diorama look that "liquid glass" achieves.

This was one of the things I loved when I switched to OS X in 2007. The Photo Booth, Pages, Preview, etc. were so beautiful. Also very easy to distinguish apps by icons. Now they all look the same-ish.

There was a lot more whimsy as well. The Adium instant messenger had its green bird logo as an icon. And the bird icon in the Dock flapped its wings when you had a new message (this was pre-native notifications, though Adium may have had Growl support already). I think it would also open its eyes when you started the app.

I was also surprised at how many times I didn’t choose the final icon as my favorite, annd more so how many times it was one of the even older ones.

This sort of thing smells of group decisions.

Jobs and Ives were the voices of reason at Apple. They need someone to fill-in for them.

I miss that feeling. No part of me would agree that Apple is a more impressive company today than it was 13 years ago, despite its market cap.

It looks like sometimes this approach has led to more details or an entirely different design, and sometimes less details. Almost like a normalization of sorts to better standardize around a level of details and amount of contrast and brightness.

I feel like peak Apple icon design was around 2014, where they were high-resolution and clearly depicted what the application was. Since then, they are all moving towards these indistinct, abstract hieroglyphics.

Still might not address your concerns, but I also don’t think the site currently shows them accurately

But designers don’t get paid to keep things the same.

Why do you believe that? Is an icon a pictogram or ideogram?

An icon should indicate what the program does, and with higher quality displays, there's no reason why more detail in the icon would be worse. Icons aren't logos in the sense they have to be adapted for every possible use case (where those use cases may have technical limitations), e.g. on a huge box truck, embroidered on a shirt, or as a favicon.

Now we have icons where you basically can't tell what this is about and more and more icons look extremely similar. Not sure this is better.

Photorealism is pretty good at that, since objects tend to look like themselves and nothing else, meaning they are unambiguous, and afford familiarity because even if your trash can at your desk looks nothing like the old photorealistic silver mesh trash can from Macs of yore, you can still probably figure out what it is really fast.

I am sick and tired of overwrought artsy fartsy mimmimulizsm hierogplyhic “icons” instead of something I can actually fucking see and recognize.