Redesigning the Save Symbol

A "phone" these days is usually, more or less, a small box with one glowy side. Yet these self-same devices, to represent "phone", use the silhouette of the handset from an old Bell Telephone landline model, thirty years after those phones went out of fashion. To even the younger generation, that shape means "phone", even if it doesn't look like a phone.

Similarly, the D-pad from a NES controller -- or worse, an Atari 2600 joystick -- is often used to represent or signify "video games".

"Home" is based on tract housing from the 1950s; yet even if home to you is an apartment, condo unit, palace, or boat, that icon still means "home".

There's another example. I just recently bought a Moleskine with an abstract graphic image of an audiocassette on it. There's no real reason for this; it's very hipster. It's sort of "celebrating the audiocassette" because to an entire generation of people, the cassette -- and its shape -- meant music (especially music on the go, like in a Walkman). Youngsters connect to it too, in a "retro" way. The same will be true of the floppy disk icon. No one uses it now, but it was ubiquitous that -- like the audiocassette or the distinctively shaped horn of a Victrola phonograph -- its shape has become semi-permanently associated in our culture with its intended use.

Maybe I'm getting old, but seeing conversations like this irritate me. All I see in that wall of text are activity indicators, upload icons, and "TO THE CLOUD!!!" icons.

Internet Comment Designers seem to think that skeuomorphism (a word they love using to tell the world 'LOOK, I KNOW BIG WORDS SO I MUST BE GOOD AT THINGS') must always be a bad thing...as if using the icon to save as a floppy disk is somehow less confusing to the average person than a circle with line, space, longer line, space, shorter line, space, rest of circle is somehow more intuitive.

People use & all the time and don't know what it means. Hell, @ doesn't even have a clear definition! But people know what it means, and that's what matters.

How come people don't use a hard disk as a save icon? How come the icon of a CD didn't catch on as a "Burn" action?

Its not because these actions are any less actionable than "saving" to a floppy disk. Its because you can clearly tell WHAT a floppy is compared to other donut looking objects, and that is what matters!

You don't need to flatten the UI or make something you think looks like an IEC symbol (protip: the symbol you all use for on/off is IEC 5009 symbol for "standby"). All you need to do is make sure that the symbol is unique enough that it can't be confused for anything else. Having the added back story that it used to "be" something else makes it trivia fodder in 50 years.

Yes, Apple is stupid for making their calendar look like a book. No, I am not a knuckle-dragging cave man for thinking a floppy disk is a good symbol for "commit to disk."

Get off my damned lawn.

I think this is something that should be done, but I sense that fragmented circles are more of a "flat" reaction to iconography of obsolete technology. But obsolete technology generally makes for good, intuitive icons. I don't think the up and down arrows are especially good at conveying things either, especially since they'll probably be paired with other up and down icons that mean other things (like disclose menus, scroll, etc). Maybe the new generation has never seen a floppy, but they also haven't seen a magnifying glass, an hourglass, or a rotary phone, yet they've managed to learn them as part of the visual vocabulary of computing.

I'm not a designer, but I think most of the ideas on display here are fashion-forward dead ends.

App should just save automatically.

Usually when people use save, they actually want to take an action. (ie: exporting the file somewhere, sending it to someone, etc.)

This thread should focus on identifying those actions and finding more universal ways to make them ubiquitous.

What if there was a universal "send this" or "invite someone to collaborate" button?

I always wondered why nobody else seemed to follow the lead of Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows. Use "save" and "load" icons that portray arrows pointing to and from folders [1]. Never have to worry about a floppy again.

Turns out, these guys just did that. Except with documents [2] and clouds [3] instead of folders. Guess iOS did away with those.

[1] - As seen in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lotus_1-2-3_9.8_Windows.p... , upper left corner

[2] - http://branch.com/b/redesigning-the-save-symbol-let-s-do-thi...

[3] - http://branch.com/b/redesigning-the-save-symbol-let-s-do-thi...

Google Docs doesn't have a Save function, instead it has an endless revision history.

Which makes me think... if I'm coding and the project is in git repository, why am I still manually saving all the time? Why not automatically save every change I make as a revision, and provide me with endless undo (even if I quit the IDE). "Save" could now instead do a git rebase & squash to produce a neater commit from the many intermediate revisions.

What's so bad about a floppy disk icon? Even if the kids today don't know what that is, they still know the icon means save. We recognize a pawnbroker's symbol or a barber pole without knowing where they came from.

I prefer text to icons. Text has less ambiguity with the additional benefits of being easier to implement and faster to load (at least for html/css). An example is the new Safari [1] and Chrome devtools, which both stem from the old Safari devtools [2]. The new chrome devtools removes the top row navigation icons, leaving only text like 'Elements' and 'Resources'. It's cleaner and tighter than the old UI without sacrificing usability. Safari 6 removed the text and kept the icons. I find myself constantly lost and cycling through the icons. Admittedly, I only use Safari devtools to debug safari issues.

Back to the original topic, I think auto-save and undo obsolete the save button.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/technologies/safari/developer-to...

[2] this site has chrome screenshots, but it's what safari 5 dev tools looked like: https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/ov...

Alternatively, we could make autosave ubiquitous so the symbol is no longer needed.

It doesn't need to be redesigned. I hate this trend of getting rid of very clear text and using nothing but "intuitive" icons that are "universally" understood, and only sometimes making the text available on hover/hold. Using both icon and text is fine, but text is way more important and unambiguous and should always be visible. Especially with the resolution and screen real estate modern displays have.

I disagree that no-one is ever likely to replace a floppy icon - the argument is based on the idea that everyone today knows what the floppy icon means.

everyone is only 1 billion people with a USA influenced cultural history and a Microsoft influenced PC history.

FirefoxOS stands a good chance of reaching a new billion people, and some mobile device will, and what will the chinese-ubuntu choose for save? There are going to be 10bn people alive in 2050 (I hope!) and 9bn of them have not seen a floppy disk icon.

It might be that we stick with the icon and everyone starts spelling skeuomorphism wrong. But is it likely?

So I quite like the discussion shown here. There are a couple of good ideas. And the new devices, then new mental models of synching local and remote storage, are going to need new iconography. Will these guys do it? Only if they buy a domain, produce high quality glyphs with open discussions, make it free and blog about it incessantly - then maybe when the next big thing comes along, they might just reach out and take the easy icon set. That would be nice.

The save symbol doesn't need to become universally known like radiation and biohazard. The concept won't need to be known in another decade.

In my concept of the future there will be no "Save", but instead any input/document will be passively cached locally in volatile storage, and archived incrementally on a non-volatile medium... without any active user input. In which case you'd only need an icon for "New", "Open" and "Delete".

If you're talking about representing a change of state (volatile to non-volatile), then borrow from Chemistry where a change from liquid to gas is represented by an arrow up, and a change from liquid to solid is represented by an arrow down. You could use the Unicode character U+21DF, a symbol that's already on every computer. Inversely you could use U+21DE to indicate "Load".

Do you really think about floppy disks when you save something? Most people don't. That's what makes it an effective symbol. You don't have to think, decipher, or read. Everyone has learned it and has become more productive by it. Why change that? Would it be wise to modernize traffic symbols as well? If you're going to try to force users to learn something new, there better be something in it for them (I don't see what that would be) and you would need just about every developer to agree upon and use this new symbol (good luck), otherwise you've pretty much asked Christians to change the cross symbol to a new modern torture device.

Is this necessary? We use plenty of symbols the origin of which have since become obsolete and mostly forgotten. Almost everyone is familiar with the meaning of arrows, for example, but not many people are immediately conscious of how it derives its shape from an archery context. The shape has transcended its origins and now simply refers to a context; the same can be true of floppy disks for save (and I'd argue, already is, as I'm sure there are young people now who are aware of what the symbol means but might not be familiar with its originating technology).

What's next, redesigning half of the English language because it contains so many words derived from Latin?

It doesn't matter where icons, words, or any identifier comes from so long as everyone understands it. If you're creating a new icon then it's a good idea to make the design intuitive as this improves its chance for adaption, but doing so to an ubiquitous icon such as "save" is just counter-productive.

This must be what older generations felt like when music kept getting redefined by younger generations.

Here I am, screaming at my screen "Why can't you whipper snappers just leave it the way it is! I like the floppy disk icon! This is the devils work I tell you! You're going to ruin the internet!!"

I thought it was interesting. Not because I think the save button needs a redesign, but because it was fun to watch the design process. I think that everyone that is genuinely complaining in these comments need to chill out a bit. They admitted that the whole thing was academic.

The floppy disc rendering is already a timeless symbol for the 'Save' action. The first thing you think about when seeing it is 'Save' not 'I need to get my disc out.'

Also most apps save automatically and usually use an animation of something spinning, so you're already a tad too late.

This seems to me to be like proposing a square wheel because round ones are unattractive.

If you have a universal cultural idiom, I think it means you won the war of conveying a concept.

I think the idea of "save" may even go away. For example, there's no save button on google docs.

Computers should never lose your work, you shouldn't have to instruct it.

I think they should get away from the word "save" and focus on the word "store". It abstracts the final location, and would be easier to "icon-ize".

Using animation is a good idea, but do we really need a redesign?

Use a drawing of the universal media, punched magnetic tape.

"The Save symbol is years overdue for a rethink."

Why?

> How can this immensely vital symbol be communicated in a timeless form so we never have to go through this again?

How about by picking a form that will always be in the past, and already well-documented and broadly understood, instead of trying to guess which of today's fads will be remembered?