[danillonunes]

I understand free-shaped icons can sometimes be really bad designed and look really shitty, but one of Apple's distinguished features was their high-quality icons. It was even transmitted to other software companies that target Apple devices. You could tell with high confidence when a software was made specifically for Mac and when it was ported just looking at the icon.

Now everything is this sad rounded cornered square.

[ericmay]

> Now everything is this sad rounded cornered square.

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.

[gyomu]

> Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there

This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.

The more interesting discussion to have is why the field of software design has come to the point it’s at today, and why many designers think that work like the kind Apple is doing is good design.

[ericmay]

> This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s a rhetorical device, not an argument. Of course there are people with that title working there.

I don’t think it has too much to do with software though, I meant to address a general cultural malaise that we can see (or I can see) surface in design broadly across industries. The software industry (writing code and papers about it and such) is probably, I say as I haven’t really felt the need to commit to an opinion here, one of the better design oriented industries precisely because the design of software, elegant code that is efficient and elastic to demand, reliable, and performant, seems to me to be progressing quite nicely.

But software by its very nature isn’t meant to be superfluous - unlike say, good architecture with ornamentation and carefully selected materials that are adapted for a given environment.

To serve the purpose of an interesting conversation, I don’t think focusing on a rhetorical comment as very important. Maybe engage with the substance (or lack thereof if that’s your opinion) of the content instead? Not to sound like a jerk I don’t mean to - just that it may be more interesting.

[newdee]

I dunno, I kinda like the new icons.

[derefr]

My hypothesis is that, at least on VisionOS, some apps are full of — almost cluttered with — 3D objects; and so Apple felt that, for the sake of your eye being easily able to jump to "where the UI is" amongst all that, the user needed to be able to visually differentiate/distinguish action buttons (incl. "buttons that launch apps" — essentially what these app icons are, esp. on the mobile OSes) from those 3D objects. This was achieved by ensuring that action buttons are always button-shaped, rather than allowing them to be arbitrary-object-shaped.

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.

[microtonal]

but one of Apple's distinguished features was their high-quality icons

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.

[mattl]

Yeah Adium supported Growl. Adium still works but hasn’t seen much of an update in a while last time I checked.

[p_ing]

The upside of this 'button-as-icon' interface is that you have a predicable area to hit with the mouse. In macOS of today, if you don't click the area the icon fills, you miss the target. Each icon may have a unique area to hit.

[pishpash]

In the days of freeware (pre-App Store "free"), you could pretty well tell the quality of the software by the quality of its icon.

[vroot]

Yeah, and they’re blurrier.

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.

[etchalon]

Jobs and Ives made numerous horrendous design decisions while at Apple.

Brushed Metal springs to mind.

[andrepd]

Came here to comment this. Why the obsession with the ubiquitous universal rounded rectangle? There must be some reason these corporations figured out because they're all doing the same.

[dialup_sounds]

I think it's because it reads as "app", which is a more contemporary and encompassing conception than for users than just an icon or logo. Blame the very first iPhone for choosing slightly-Aqua-like roundrects for everything.

Yes, it looks weird to old eyes on the desktop, where the button-like shape is more familiar as a touch target, but we still recognize that they're apps.

It also allows the developer some control over the canvas that their arbitrarily-shaped logo is painted on, rather than just dropping it right on your user's wallpaper of their kids birthday party.

(As an aside, I'm on a Pixel that uses circles, but the Play Store (whose logo is a triangle) uses roundrects, so there's also a certain flexibility in app icons being a canvas within a platform-variable container shape, even if that's not a roundrect everywhere.)

[reaperducer]

ubiquitous universal rounded rectangle

Squircle.

[simondotau]

Before anyone downvotes, this isn’t mere semantics. Apple changed from rounded rectangles to squircles in iOS 7.

https://blog.minimal.app/rounded-corners-in-the-apple-ecosys...

[andrepd]

Even worse, the slightly rounded rectangle looks much better than the squircle.

[dfxm12]

A few things. Apple wants to control the visual narrative. They don't want icons to stand out because they want people to think they're using an apple device, not an Adobe product.

Companies see design as gold plating rather than something that gives a competitive advantage. This means they copy what's popular or outsource.

There's also probably fewer design firms working with these companies. This means fewer original ideas.