[arcbyte]

This a really interesting and persuasive read for me. I've been thinking about this topic as part of brainstorming a simple design system and I had come to the conclusion that the inconsistency of not having icons for every menu item was a big annoyance. After seeing how descriptive the icons are in older menu examples compared to the abstract blobs in newer menus, I have to admit I might be wrong. At the very least, ensuring that the icons themselves are as illustrative as possible about the intended outcome of its selection is necessary.

It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better.

I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?

[DonHopkins]

Check out how Blender’s entire UI (menus, buttons, hotkeys, pie menus, toolbar tools, context menus, etc) is built on a single abstraction: operators -- universal command objects that can be used in many contexts.

Every operator has:

Identifier: mesh.extrude_region_move

Label: human-readable string, like "Extrude Region"

Description: tooltip text, like "Extrude selected vertices, edges or faces along their normals"

Icon: optional enum from Blender’s built-in icon set, like ICON = 'MESH_EXTRUDE_REGION'

RNA properties: parameters / flags like direction, axis, booleans

Poll function: whether it is available in current context, like only enabled when a mesh is in edit mode

Execution logic: the actual command code

Blender’s designers generally follow these principles:

Operators always have labels. Icons are optional. Most menu items use no icon by default. Only well-established visual operations (cursor, transform tools, viewport shading modes, etc.) get icons.

Unlike macOS Tahoe’s vague "everything gets an icon" ideology, Blender uses icons when they convey meaning, but not when they’re decorative filler.

[yuye]

>It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item.

It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.

Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.

Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.

Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.

[heavyset_go]

> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?

It's a symbol, it could be a 7-pointed star and people would associate it with Save.

Even when you knew what a floppy disk was, why would you push that button? You haven't seen a floppy in years, don't have a floppy drive and don't want to create a floppy disk.

[concinds]

> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?

This is a pet peeve of mine and it feels like some cargo cult within the UI design "field". There's nothing wrong with the floppy icon. It's perfectly fine. Even if someone doesn't get it, the consistency of its use across apps is enough for its meaning to be clear, which is what really matters.

[arcbyte]

Before I read the blog post I would have agreed with you. It's pervasive, well understood, and the meaning is clear which you point out is what really matters.

But after reading the article I find myself asking if that's really true? I'm doubting it now. Certainly, the Floppy disk icon is clear to computer users who experienced at least a few years of the 90's or early 2000's. That's becoming less and less a percentage of computer users. For most users, that floppy disk has receded into being just a nonrepresentative shape associated to save.

I think it's that the blog post convinced me to reject nonrepresentative shapes as icons. You can't look at the extremely illustrative menu filled with icons that clearly describe window management actions or text formatting actions - where the icon itself conveys clearly, if abstractly, exactly how reality will look after you take the action - and tell me that a menu filled with random nonillustrative shapes has even a similar experience. I can't shake the idea that the menu icon needs to be more than just a logo or branding - it needs to be self-explaining.

The floppy disk did exactly the above when floppy disks were where the data was actually saved. But in 2025, we have to accept that it no longer illustrates anything. Today its just a nonrepresentative shape.

[concinds]

The human brain works with nonrepresentative shapes perfectly fine, otherwise companies wouldn't emphasize logos so much, often without even their actual name next to the logo.

Again, you don't even need to know what a floppy is or that it exists; its consistency and omnipresence, alongside the "Save" label most of the time, is enough to create meaning, such that most people will recognize it without the label.

[Someone]

FWIW: Apple’s SF Symbols font doesn’t have an image of a floppy disk, nor does it have an icon meaning “save”.

[abustamam]

I think local save is usually the floppy and cloud save is usually a cloud icon . The semantics change a bit when the app in question is a cloud app though.