Nostalgia yes. And also utility. Icons have to scale both now and back then. Yet back then you had to draw pixel at a time or it looked like mud. Now you can downsample and most will never see anything smaller than 128x128.
Still sucks for users if they only see it rendered at half that size for menu or a reduced size taskbar. Or if it relies on color contrast without consideration for color blindness. Some designers aren't thoughtful enough to check.
I sometimes wonder what would've happened if the UI itself hadn't changed much; if Windows had retained those icons, that style, those ways of doing things. What if we had the Windows 95/98 look but with the benefit of 20+ years of polish and refinement?
Not saying I think their UI is perfect, but perhaps we'd see people feel a lot more familiar/comfortable with their computers, and perhaps it would also have inspired future generations not to constantly redesign things. Just as Apple became an inspiration for designers; it could have been the other side of that coin.
Not the exact icons, but the usage pattern is still alive and well with the Cinnamon and MATE desktops (the latter with the Redmond preset iirc). I won't use anything else.
Fun and a bit sad to think about from some angles. For instance the often maligned baby boomer generation essentially had the UI/UX rug from pulled from underneath them leading to loss of confidence and computer skill regression. Not to mention probably opened them up further to fishing and other computer scams due to a combination of UI churn, generally being flustered by changing conventions, etc. Not to pin all their computing woes on this, but I think it’s had a large negative effect
I remember buying the very first iPad for my mom. One thing that she really liked was that huge, prominent physical button that you could press to immediately go to the home screen. No matter which app she ended up in and how confusing it was, the safe place was always there within easy reach. It made her that much more confident to actually go and explore.
Now, she's supposed to slide from the bottom edge, I suppose. Except if you don't do it vigorously enough, it doesn't actually bring you home. But, hey, the gadget is now 15mm shorter!
How the hell did we regress from these immediately recognizable works of art to what we have today: uninspired, barely discernable hieroglyphs? See Material icons, Bootstrap icons, Font Awesome... all boring as hell, and for how many N millions of dollars these corporations spend on artists and graphic designers and UX designers they still can't seem to break out of this tired trend.
"Ah but hieroglyph icons of today scale better!" Well, hieroglyph icons of today scale consistently, but remember the icon designers back in the day would make different sizes of each icon to be clearly recognizable at all scales (the whole point of the .ico format!), and to me that is way better than what we have now.
Part of it probably has to do with how sterile modern hieroglyphs are.
Look at those Windows 3.1/95/98/ME/2K/XP/Vista/7 icons: They have character. You try and tell me they didn't have fun drawing the icons for MS Agent and Dr. Watson; the fun and sense of humor the devs and artists had making them just ooze out.
Modern day hieroglyphs? They aim to not confuse or offend anyone, and end up impressing noone. They aim to speak all languages and end up speaking nothing. They aim to inform everyone and end up informing noone.
I have to concur. I find that I am somewhat icon blind these days and can scan over an icon/app that I am looking for multiple times in certain instances before finding it
> Modern day hieroglyphs? They aim to not confuse or offend anyone, and end up impressing noone. They aim to speak all languages and end up speaking nothing. They aim to inform everyone and end up informing noone.
I would disagree as to the supposed 'aims'. Most flat designers don't aim to do anything - they just kept mindlessless repeating the mantra of 'minimalism' to the point where everything looks the same.
Your use of the word 'hieroglyphs' I think is very apt - because that's what they are: hieroglyphs, and NOT icons, as earlier versions of Windows had them.
But those of Skeumorphic elements, so they don't fit into modern flat design and eliminating any affordances. Our designers are still trying to get the rest of the business to accept hyperlinks that look exactly like the rest of the text, so that the only way you can know what is clickable is hover the mouse on it, or try tapping it. /s
Gradients on buttons to make them appear rounded and clickable are dead these days. Nothing suggests the maximize/minimize/close buttons are buttons anymore other than being abstract looking symbols that are otherwise out of place (at least until you hover over them).
Hiding all scrollbars is totally the trend these days, so the only way to know that something is scrollable is either by trying to scroll it, or noticing cut off content. If the window is sized just right so no content is cut off, it is easy to not realize scrolling is even possible until you eventually do it accidentally.
Those sorts of icons just don't fit into this type of usability harming hyper minimalism that was largely intended to save precious screen space on small mobile devices, but which are simply moronic on full sized computers. sigh
i think increased screen resolution (and smaller sized devices) led to a pixel art identity crisis. as you mentioned, everything today is expected to scale and fit on any sized screen. that wasn't the case when everything was explicitly designed for monitors with a resolution between 800x600 and 1024x768. the nice pixel art of windows 98 wouldn't really translate well to both a phone, a desktop computer, and a big screen TV at the same time.
except i doubt that's the entire story, because even though pixel art doesn't scale well, you could make very nice, detailed, inspired, responsive vector graphics using SVG, which would scale up or down to any size. but that probably would cost way too much money to produce, so we're now in the era where companies have brazenly embraced 'phoning it in' as an aesthetic (e.g. material icons, bootstrap, font awesome, etc.). so far, users have either put up with it, or have been tricked into embracing it too
I looked up the Silk icons and they appear to be about half the dimensions (1/4 area) and high color. I was thinking that there were upscalers that targeted and worked well with 16-color/more pixelated images.
SVG isn't necessarily the panacea you're making it out to be. If you have a highly detailed SVG that looks great at large sizes, when you rasterize it at low resolutions, it looks like a gray soup.
Haiku's icon format[0] seems to solve this issue: not only it supports per-shape level of detail, allowing elements of an icon to be hidden, appear or replaced based on the icon scale size, it is also much smaller than SVG (supposedly average size for Haiku icons is 500-700 bytes) so it can be used directly.
You can make SVGs responsive based on their raster size[0] using media queries. So there's no need for a grey soup when the icon is rastered at small dimensions.
That's something the browser is doing, not something the SVG renderer is doing. Someone still has to make multiple versions of the same image with different levels of detail, and some software still needs to pick the right one for a given resolution.
I can tell you why I use lazy stuff like FontAwesome and highly reusable assets. The company I work at has a huge focus on small, independent teams (they call it Amazon-esqe). In the long term, I get penalized if I don’t make sure that I close every ticket that was assigned to me for a particular sprint. Pulling in any other teams increases my risk exposure to not closing a ticket for reasons outside of my control, so I just use pre-canned solutions whenever possible in order to hold on to my job.
Design is countersignalling. Same as how we went from websites that put all the information on the first screen to those that conspicuously waste acres of space. Putting less information on the screen, and making icons harder to distinguish, signals that the site has sophisticated users and is best viewed on an expensive monitor.
Part of the reason might be caused by the popularity of the consumption web where sites want photo to be king, so they reach for minimalistic icons. Font awesome was invented and the look ended up being fed back into productivity apps.
Haiku had an icon format that is vector and also allows the inclusion or exclusion of detail based on render size. It's a pretty good update on the old way.
A lot of low skilled designers entered the workforce and they really fell in love with "clean ui" because it required so much less skill compared to making icons like these.
Yep. This is the uncomfortable truth: back in the heyday of Aqua, if you wanted a good icon, you had to pay a skilled artist about 40% of the sum that, today, gets you a full app design sketch.
Folks look at the cool designs from that era (and late '90s Windows) and want them back. You can't have that and $0.99 apps. If you try to get that kind of design with today's design budgets, you get exactly the kind of Y2K photo app skeumorphic design that everyone hated.
This may be true wrt. skeuomorphic Aqua-like designs, but pixel art with low native resolution and low color depth is the cheapest style of them all, only literal pencil drawings on the back of a napkin are cheaper. Look at SerenityOS for the kind of polished design that can be achieved with ease even by amateurs.
That is still substantially more expensive than flat/symbolic icons, simply on account of it requiring human effort. A substantial number of modern-style icons and logos that you see in the wild are obtained by (lightly) retouching the best our of a handful of auto-generated candidates. Since most logos are just "stylish" text now, and most icons are just variations on some letters/geometric shapes, there's a pretty lucrative grey market of tools that pump these out programatically.
The issue of scaling isn't so much about scaling in display dimensions but display pixel density. All the different resolution raster images stored in an ICO file were all displayed at the same ~96ppi of Windows. With high DPI displays and scaling a "pixel" is no longer necessarily a hardware pixel. Raster icons that display without upscaling on high DPI displays balloon in size quickly because they need 2x to 3x the number of pixels as the 1x version. Vector icons can have tiny file sizes but can be rasterized at any needed resolution and density.
The hieroglyphic-style icons remain sharp and distinct at most resolutions and densities. You also need to keep in mind the icon sets you mentioned (Material etc) are meant to be used by third parties. They're sort of indistinct and non-offensive because they're supposed to work with a site's branding. The icons are not supposed to be a site's branding. Windows' icons were part of the Windows product branding.
Designers seem to have no problem ballooning the size of their pages with high-resolution photos and videos through. Perhaps it's because getting high-resolution photos and videos is a lot easier than designing and creating icons in multiple resolutions.
One fundamental concept we've given up is "what you see is what you get". Open up a window from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 7 and things that behave different look different. The part of the window "inside" and the part of the window border you can click and drag to resize or move around are two different colors. The minimize, maximize, and close buttons are a different color from the part of the title bar you can click to move the window around. Not so anymore. The "close" button is now a visible X and an invisible rectangle around the X. The drag-able border of the window is an invisible radius surrounding the edge of a window. I hope the executive responsible for this rots in hell.
Exactly. Eg. at some point Ubuntu (true also for Win) decided no proper borders around windows and giant title bars. Now I always struggle findig the border, to grab, between two partially overlapping black terminal windows. And wasting screen realestate on title bars and margins just bugs the hell out of me. I've spent hours trying to fix these things, gave up in the end, there was always something that didn't work right. Why did the world forget doing reasonable defaults that just work without tweaking. Oh and don't get me started on disappearing scrollbars, and lazy loading ui components, which reorder what's under focus/mouse/finger every half a second, and make me do a wrong click if I'm in a hurry
> Exactly. Eg. at some point Ubuntu (true also for Win) decided no proper borders around windows and giant title bars. Now I always struggle findig the border, to grab, between two partially overlapping black terminal windows.
Try setting up alt + right click, or windows + right click to resize the windows. I have AltDrag installed on Windows, and I can grab my windows anywhere to move or resize.
It wasn't so bad as long as you turned the window title height down to normal. Then it was nice because you wouldn't prick your finger on sharp edges anymore.
Out of the box, the extra window title height took up too much room, ugh. But then now there's so much whitespace everywhere.
I call it the start of the decline, as it was the first version of Windows which featured on-line activation, legitimising the practice in the wider industry.
Let's rephrase @endgame's comment as "Windows XP and Office XP were the first versions of their respective series where product activation was mandatory on all retail editions." Point still stands I guess.
7 also had the most flexible/capable iteration of the Windows theme engine, which enabled the creation of a wide variety of high quality third party themes you could use if Aero wasn't quite your thing but you also didn't want to drop back to Win9x look.
8 gutted the Windows theme engine because most of it wasn't needed to render flat squares and it still has yet to recover.
It took, what, 3 clicks to disable Luna and get back to slate grey?
And one more click to disable the XP-style control panel.
OTOH app compatibility in XP was quite a bit better, esp. with games. IIRC that's when Windows first started to experiment with features like virtualized disk and registry writes?
XP, yes, but don't forget the service packs. Win XP sucked SO much when it came out initially. Just burned a lot of resources for seemingly no gain, and it was very unstable, compared to the previous editions we ran at the time. With SP1 it was much better, but that was years after it came out, 2001 vs 2004 I think.
All icons are confusing until they're burned into your memory.
How confusing they are has more to do with the complexity of the operation they symbolize than the design of the icon itself.
Naming is hard. Symbolizing is hard. Normalizing operations is not hard. I don't blame modern icons. I blame poor abstractions driven by marketing becoming the norm.
I'm waiting for designers to figure out some way to signify "save" without using a picture of a floppy disk. That was great back in the day, but I bet a large number of computer users have never seen a diskette.
People who use cameras (dash cams, action cams, drone cameras), portable game consoles (by which I mean the Switch, yes, but also all those Shezhen "retro consoles"), and a few other things. People do still know what SD cards are, even if they don't have a slot for one on their flagship phone.
Nevertheless, the real issue is more that "saving" isn't really something you do any more; almost all apps now autosave and restore on restart, such that the real action that needs an icon isn't "save"; it's the option you get when you indicate you'd like to close an open, but unnamed project/document without quitting the application: "give this project/document a name."
Outside of the First World, that would be most people with budget Android smartphones, which normally come with limited storage and an expectation that someone who needs more can always buy a card.
People get what radio buttons are even if they never saw a radio with the mutually exclusive buttons[0] that these UI elements were inspired from - they were obsolete even back in the 80s.
Personally i never made the association until almost 2 decades after using computers with radio button elements, despite growing up having a monochrome TV that had actual "radio buttons" (or TV buttons in that case, which probably helped to avoid the association :-P).
And most people know what a phonograph/gramophone is without ever seeing one in person. I don't think a floppy icon will confuse anyone if they know it is for saving and is consistently used as the "saving icon", regardless of if they've seen a real floppy disk or not :-).
They might not be on radios any more, but round mutually-exclusive pop-up buttons are still something everyone in the modern world runs into — as, to this day, they're the idiomatic way to do speed selection on table fans.
Well, they are still called radio buttons, not fan buttons :-P.
Also i think those might be on their way out, the last fan i bought had a touch buttons (not screen) - and yeah, i often did mis-tap the button i wanted :-/
Oh, so beautiful and so nostalgic. I think I always associated unconsciously GIF with the green color, and JPEG with the red color. The explanation may be on these icons: JPG is the frame with a red painting, while GIF is the frame with the green painting. I remember using them as a kid a lot in the 2000s when designing my own webpages in Frontpage + Paint.
Cool browser. But, these icons were not meant to be rendered with the heavy anti-aliasing performed by today's web browsers and displays. There is now a CSS property `image-rendering` which you can set to `pixelated` to perform nearest-neighbor resizing. This looks great as long as you use a sensible whole-number multiple for the image dimensions.
Try adding a `* {image-rendering: 'pixelated'}` in dev tools and you can see these icons in their true glory.
Yes, but 95+98+2000 were basically all of the same design philosophy, so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb when something was not changed from 95.
Is there a Gnome or KDE theme or clone inspired by Windows 2000? Windows 8, 10, and 11 are simply offensive in comparison. I kept and open mind but still haven't come around to liking any version, not even close to W2K.
Edit: jeroenhd, this is superb, thank you for sharing!
Also the BMW 7-series from 1998-1999 was one of the best ever. Every subsequent one isn't nearly as good, IMO.
There are several themes that try to approach older versions of Windows. Support for the latest versions of DEs is not guaranteed, though.
I've run variants of this: https://b00merang.weebly.com/desktop-themes.html on GNOME for quite some time, without putting in the effort to recreate the start menu. My coworkers definitely looked at me weird for my Windows XP theme but it felt very nostalgic. Small details are off, though, unless you go in manually and tweak the CSS even further to correct for the differences between the author's DE and yours.
For LXDE, this project: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 goes further than just a theme, restyling some common utilities as well. It's not Windows 95, but if you'd told me it was designed around that time I would've believed you.
What I myself would love is for someone to make a proper Windows 7 Aero theme for Linux. The icon sets and the backwards compatibility themes are available everywhere, but there's no Aero theme that's not jarring. In a perfect world, I'd like the frosted glass effect as well, but that's probably too much to ask. I've thrown some Windows DLLs into Ghidra to try and find the frosted glass theme engine code, but I had no idea where to look and couldn't find anything.
I have a gut feeling that SerenityOS is going to have the same kind of progress that Linux had. Started as a little hobby side project "but nothing serious" but could eventually become something that ends up being a really useful. We will see where it is in another 5 years. Coming from a completely fresh base means that it has not gather the same technical legacy as others and that could really play to its hands in years to come.
The Watercolor placeholder theme[0] for Windows XP was such a beautiful evolution of that Windows 2000 look and feel: much more professional looking than Luna, modern but obviously Microsoft, and very space efficient. I recently reinstalled XP on an old computer for some retro gaming and the first thing I did was find Watercolor and the anxiety induced by Windows XP instantly gave way to joy.
Windows 2000 will always be my favorite Windows, but XP with Watercolor is the best looking, imho.
Watercolor is great! I used it too "back in the day". That crisp Tahoma font, those refined little squares where the 2 colors in the title bar meet... So elegant.
Speaking of Tahoma, I think that one was a big part of why Win2K looked so much better (the 9x series used Microsoft Sans Serif as its default UI font). It's not much to look at today, but it was amazingly readable on low-res screens back then.
I wonder sometimes just how much effort went into manually hinting it at all the standard UI sizes to make it pixel-perfect.
Every six months or so I look for the ability to skin Windows 10 to look like this, or like Windows Classic at least. It seems to be largely impossible.
Touchscreens really do ruin everything they touch (ha) in terms of UI design. All buttons need to be gigantic and simple, can't have mouse hover menus or anything nice.
Absolutely. Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Classical Millenial Windows design. After that we got XP’s Fisher Price mode (albeit easily regressed) and it’s been downhill since then (switched to Mac in ‘03, totally baffled by Windows UI nowadays).
To answer your specific question, Apple's Lisa was released on January 19, 1983. It had a waste basket. The Mac OS and its trash can debuted along with the original Macintosh computer on January 24, 1984. Windows introduced the recycle bin along with Windows 95 which was released on August 24, 1995.
The icon gallery could use image-rendering: pixelated, though. For 4k and "retina" displays. Otherwise the browser upscales it with cubic interpolation and it will look blurry.
I'm a big fan of the SVG icons used in the Azure Portal. They're embedded directly into the HTML, so they're efficient. Their design is simple and looks good both at small sizes and scaled up. They have a fairly consistent color scheme and "design language", making them easily recognisable. You can download the SVG files separately and embed them in design documents, preserving the high-quality vector art format!
I have my own complaints with how AWS does their icons. however
current icon set used by AWS is way better than the "3D" icons they had earlier
I think having "lines on a square" can also be converted to SVG.
In fact AWS page you linked does have an "Assets Package" download that included both PNG and SVG icons for both light and dark backgrounds.
the "single-color square" is actually a gradient fill too -- whether that is better is subjective.
I have always felt the need for an API that serves the correct icon in chosen resolution and format. we recently saw a HN post that argued that architecture diagrams should be code. this would be one necessary step towards that.
Trans men exist. I mean it's kind of edge-casey to include in Unicode, because trans-man pregnancies aren't super common, but if you're going to do both genders for all the other things, makes sense for that too.
Is there anything that isn’t immediately turned into a pointless culture war argument these days?
This is an article about the design of Windows 98 icons. You’re complaining about two emojis in 2023.
I really have to wonder about the thought process that sees “iconography” and immediately goes to “can you believe Apple made a pregnant man emoji?!?”. It’s exhausting.
I was going to mention how nice the old Black-White-Orange-Blue icons from the 80's Amiga era were, but it turns out I've completely misremembered and they really are quite horrible.
I think that's your perspective. It's clear that one of them triggers a strong reaction in you while the other doesn't, but other people feel differently.
> The other is a product of pandering and crazy talk.
Spot on. No sane person would ever say they saw a man in business suit levitating in their driveway. That emoji is a textbook case of pandering to mental ilness, treating hallucinations as some spiritual journey bullshit, rather than the health problem it trully is. It's literally crazy talk.
Not sure about the wicked sense of humor in the other one but it is hard to convey humor in the form of imagery so...
Oh please. Apple, and most of big tech is extremely socially liberal, and easy to implement or not there was no need to spend time implementing it except to cater to the trans community.
If ease of implementation was the sole driving factor then why are all the handshake emojis skin tones that actually exist, stands to reason it would be just as easy to flip some color codes and have every possible skin tone from green to orange shaking hands. Where's my alien-shaking-hands-with-oompa-loompa emoji dammit?
I personally don't care, and Apple is more than welcome to promote whatever messages they want on their private platform. But let's not pretend it's apolitical.
It should be there, because it enables expression just like all other emoji. It would have been a deliberate, discriminatory choice to not include it. If someone doesn't like that emoji, guess what: They don't have to use it!
The whole point of Unicode and emoji in Unicode is to support and enable free expression for the whole world. It makes sense to lean inclusive.
I'd rather say that corporations are amoral, not political. They are only seemingly political to the degree that it benefits the business the most. On a broader scale, you can observe that they behave differently in different regions, and behavior also differs on a larger time scale, often molding to the current times.
While I have no personal opinion on this topic (it hardly affects me in anyway); the emojis were most definitely added for conscious and political purposes:
Don't you know about the cinematic masterpiece that is Junior? It's far from a new idea!
Edit: Also, aren't you undermining your own argument? If your standpoint that blandness and seeking to avoid offense is a bad thing, then surely the more weird and edgy emoji, the better.
Things like that always catch me. I reflect about how many effort people put in the past and then they suddenly get replaced (and it doesnt mean it is for the better). The same to video games. Every year a new fifa, a new cod, etc. and lots of efforts and energy stay in the past. What was super exciting back then people dont even remember it existed today.
I dunno, I think a lot of early windows icons were kind of hard to differentiate at a glance. A lot of them are just computers or windows with different smaller icons on them. You can see this even in the examples shown from the collection.
I generally agree that modern attempts to "unify" the design of icons usually go to far, but if you think Windows 98 icons are strictly better than say Windows 11 icons, that seems like rose coloured glasses to me.
The good ones are good, but the bad ones are worse. Although I do understand the appeal, and subjectively I do like them better.
As much as I am nostalgic, I agree with this. So many people here say how intuitive icons were, but which one of you can explain the meaning of the 5th icon on the first picture in the article, the one with an app window in front of a folder? I used Windows starting with 95, so it probably saw it many-many times. But now it is impossible to either remember or guess its meaning.
It's the icon for the "Programs" submenu of the Start menu. It is somewhat cryptic, but I think it's difficult to communicate "here's where your installed programs can be accessed" graphically. I don't think the icon is used anywhere else, so it's not much of a problem. You'll never see it out of context without the accompanying text.
It's genuinely hard for me to understand some of the UI/UX decisions made in the latest versions of Windows. Old versions of Windows seemed to be built in a intuitive way so even someone with no computer experience would have a chance at finding what they were looking for. Icons were designed to look like what they do. Things were labelled with text. The interface was predictable. Where as today everything just seems obscure and random...
For one, we don't have a "start" button anymore, we have a four square thing which you're suppose to just know to click. If I want to get to the control panel I have to erm... Search for it on the four squared menu thing? I'm not even sure there is a "proper" way to navigate there anymore, instead you just need to know there is a thing called the "control panel" and search for it. And even then you're never 100% sure if you want the "control panel" or "settings". And why do these two interfaces have completely different UIs? It's like the whole OS is designed to be as confusing as possible. If I didn't have experience with prior versions of Windows I'm not sure I'd even know how to do the most basic things.
There are issues with the modern windows user interface but I’m not sure it’s these. For one “start” was never actually how most people started using the computer - it is through desktop shortcuts, so the label didn’t really make sense.
The control panel is depreciated and remains for compatibility reasons and is deliberately hidden in favour of the settings button, which uses the now familiar gear icon.
Edit: I hope this comment doesn't come off as rude or anything too :). I just remember reading about this in Raymond's book and the fact that the start menu originally didn't say start stuck out to me.
Ah, but that's because those people were presumably used to Windows 3.1, where when the computer started up, a window opened displaying an icon grid of programs you could open. From the perspective of one of these people, Windows 95 is like if Windows 3.1 failed to finish booting up, so Program Manager never started, and you were stuck just staring at the wallpaper.
Well, prior to Windows 95, Windows didn't really have a desktop. 3.1's desktop was just an icon-grid taskbar. (Now I'm wondering if the "single instance" behavior of moving to front when you relaunch an app was done to accommodate that UI pattern)
Companies like Microsoft do their research. They interview the gen-Z'ers and get consistent feedback about the UIs HackerNews likes: "They're old. They're boring. They're dated. I don't like them. My grandma would use this."
Microsoft feels that it has no choice but to follow fashion trends and I am not sure that they're wrong to do so. Eventually minimalist UIs will go out of fashion and utilitarian evidence-based UIs may come back. But for now, the fashion is what it is and if companies want new users, they must follow the trend.
Regarding the hodge-podge of different UI designs, I think that that is just a function of UI/UX designers not being honest with themselves and others about whether they're doing engineering, psychology or fashion. Fashion must change for the sake of change but engineering and psychology do not. This creates inconsistencies.
Current icons will go out of fashion, then all we have left are single letters that comprise major "applications"... "T" for twitter, "F" for Facebook, "I" for Instagram. You get the idea.
The trouble is that the desktop metaphor depends on your programs being analogous to physical tools. A text editor is a notepad, a directory is a manila folder, a contacts app is a Rolodex. What iconic tool represents Twitter, or "app store," or "password manager," or "detect the song that's playing right now"? The metaphor breaks down and your icons become mere abstract shapes. If no other meaning is relevant, an eye-catchingly stylized version of the first letter of the service name at least hints at what this is.
Each time OS vendors update their UI, they add more white space and make the UI flatter. The old always complain but I just found the new design more comfortable and intuitive to use.
It is a one way trip. I can't get back to old, traditional IDE after trying the more modern VS Code.
I am a Millennial and I don't give a crap about fashion and trends. I want something that I like and is good to use. I found some old UI's ugly and clunky. I find the trend of material design just that: a trend. Just like Baroque, Rococo and Renaissance were trends. Which eventually faded, like all trends. Just like Material Design will fade. Some young people are rebels just for the sake of rebelling, and therefore it has to change regardless of whether the change is good or not. Cool, though sad. Those are the ones that most likely will become conservatives later on, as they're just following emotions. Some older people are conservative because "the good ole times when everything was better." I fit in neither, which is kind of lonely but it is what it is.
I love the W11 design, best looking one so far. Usability is not bad. W7's was better in some regards, worse in others.
I hated W10 design. Usability was poor.
W7 design was nice. Usability was good.
Windows XP design was ugly. Usability was nice.
Windows 98 was ugly. Usability was ok for the time.
You are wrong. My first graphical OS was Windows 98 at home after DOS at school. Windows 95 was built with UX/UI at mind, which lots of research. Current are themes are pure crap on usability. No contrast for buttons or menues. Too bright or too dark themes. No slight widget frames for separation.
The only semi usable flat theme under *nix it's Zukitre GTK2/3 theme with, maybe, the Newaita icons or similar. Everything else lacks lots of contrast.
Except for Motif/Athena, everything under my GNU/Linux setup uses the "blackwater-dim" GTK2/3/QT5 and the Chicago 95 theme thanks to qt5ct, among the Metal2 IceWM theme closeish to early 00's Java look. Best of worlds. A highly usable window border, keybindings, solid widget themings and virtual desktops.
Unix had brilliant points, too: Virtual desktops and moving/resizing with alt or super_l and clicking the mouse with a left/right mouse click.
Thus, you can use a Unix based WM/DE (IceWM, Mate, XFCE) with the Windows 95 theming (Chicago95) AND the Unix keybindings, having the best of the both worlds since Icewm was created from long ago.
Can't you just acknowledge that the GP just have a significantly different experience from yours? It's disappointing that you seem to just ignore everything that the GP said, with the explicit acknowledgement that it was just their personal opinion, and just rammed another comment without understanding it?
I will just ignore your thick-headed comment from this point, it's clear that you're not arguing in good faith.
The only flat theme I liked was Zukitre under Linux with the Newaita icons. Contrasted gray with clear buttons and nice icons. The rest sucked a lot. Either too bright, or dark, or contrastless.
Having worked at many companies over the years I feel like you are giving Microsoft way more credit than it probably deserves.
Politics plays a huge role in decision making, and in my experience, when it comes to UI/UX, politics accounts for 80% or more of choices.
I find it really hard to convince myself that Windows' scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign on top of each other is the result of careful planning and research.
I'm sure they do the research, and look at feedback. I just don't think it has any bearing on decision making.
"Politics" doesn't explain the change. Politics in corporations was just as bad in the 90s as it is today, if not worse.
Separately, I didn't say anything about "careful planning", I only said "research". And that the research is telling them to make the UIs look flat and non-skeuomorphic.
> scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign
This is true. I was a senior developer at Apple for a decade, and if you think they follow some rigorous UI-vetting process (or even user testing in many cases), you’re wrong. There are probably exceptions, but it’s not a company-wide norm.
I also think the fashion theory is wrong. In fact, it’s backward. Younger users didn’t demand these regressions; they’re simply more used to lazy, shitty design and the absence of the visual cues and standards that made GUIs so intuitive in the first place. So, for example, they are more likely to tap or click on a plain text label to see if it’s a control than those of us who expect controls to be demarcated as such. But once those regressions become the norm, the better designs are indeed recognizable as “older.”
Thus we all suffer a decline in design quality. Windows is now an unmitigated UI shítshow.
Fortunately we’re finally seeing some backlash against “flat” (AKA no) design.
> Old versions of Windows seemed to be built in a intuitive way so even someone with no computer experience would have a chance at finding what they were looking for.
I think the goal is very much the same today, but the people first using a computer have probably already experienced Android or iOS. Computers are now for serious business and maybe high-end video games, the rest is done on phones and tablets. The world has gone mobile first so for beginners to pick up Windows, Windows needs to be "mobile-compatible". Icons are flat and abstract, buttons are big without borders, and half your screen being filled with UI is not bad as long as you full screen that important content when it matters.
I don't think the clarity of older operating systems needs to go away per se, but people's expectations have dropped significantly with small touch screen devices and designers love showing off how "clean" their design looks.
I really dislike this trend. I switched my KDE theme to windows classic with the memphis icons and it's just a joy to use, even for a while. I like being able to tweak things, and the latest version of windows is even harder to do that.
Mobile designs are horrible about being intuitive and discoverable, to the point that many apps have tutorials about where you can swipe or double-tap and what it does because there's no reasonable way to discern this from their UI. If that's what we base our desktop UIs on it's no wonder they become less usable.
I completely agree that UX on mobile is terrible, half the controls can only be learned by random chance or brute force. However, kids grow up with mobile devices from a very young age these days, young enough for the terrible UX not to matter as much.
Copying the mobile UI is definitely a bad direction, but it's a very understandable one from a business sense and it's the only explanation I can really think of when it comes to Windows 11's iconography and design.
> but the people first using a computer have probably already experienced Android or iOS.
Rape is also an experience. A negative one.
And Android or iOS are not computers (just like a TV or a washing machine are not computers). They are specialized entertainment devices designed to extract data from the users.
I had to use Outlook recently after a decade or so to help someone declutter their mailbox.
I was shocked how unintuitive and sometimes insane that software has turned to. It's basically useless.
After spending hours trying to sort the emails, we decided to just back them up and delete everything.
My friend moved to Gmail.
I wonder what happened? Old Outlook while having some shortcomings was a manageable piece of software, whereas the new one is completely unusable.
Other Microsoft software suffer the same problems like Teams. I feel sorry for any workplace that is using any Microsoft software.
There are exceptions like VSCode, but given how things work at Microsoft, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode turned into crap nobody wants to use anymore.
They call it the Ribbon. A collections of icons (or as someone said, hyeroglyphs) arranged in who knows what order, which you need to guess what they do. Some have text, some not.
As others said -- "Control Panel" is the older UI being phased out, "Settings" is the new, unified one. And on Windows 11 it really does include 99% of what Settings had. There's only a few screens here and there for very specific, niche things that are still linked-to via Settings. (e.g.: Color Management -- you can select a color profile in Settings but you need the older "advanced" UI for manually importing ICCs and such. Colorimeters and monitor drivers auto-import ICCs.)
And "Start" has been gone for over 15 years. It transformed into the "Windows logo button" with Vista in 2006. The menu's naming was kept (and still is) but "Start" as text hasn't been a thing for a long time.
I normally use the "Change what closing the lid does" setting on laptops but it is not in Settings on Windows 11 nor is there a link to it. You have to know what search term to use to find it.
Yeah, that one is still stuck in power plan settings for some reason. But they’ve been moving to one “Balanced” plan for a while now so I guess that entire panel is going away.
I love pixel art, used Win 98 as my first OS and still find them ugly as hell. The colors are sad, the perspective is off, and on the first image[1], only 2 icons out of 6 make any sense to me (the trash and the folder). On the second image[2] I understand the wheelchair and the notepad but that's it. These icons aren't inherently easier to understand.
Years ago I tried to teach my dad how to work with Windows. He somehow wasn't capable of seeing the window borders and which window was in front. Also didn't see buttons.
Recently I have noticed that I am also beginning to struggle seeing the window borders in Windows 10. If design trends continue I may also soon be unable to operate my laptop :-(. I appreciate that MacOS hasn't gone as crazy as Window.
Just look at the top right icon in the first image.
Two computers connected by a pipe of sorts. The computers are two different colors, immediately telling you they are two separate entities (not a clone).
The pipe has a bright yellow notch.
Just perfection, damn! I wonder where the team is now and what they're designing. Anyone know?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadStill sucks for users if they only see it rendered at half that size for menu or a reduced size taskbar. Or if it relies on color contrast without consideration for color blindness. Some designers aren't thoughtful enough to check.
Not saying I think their UI is perfect, but perhaps we'd see people feel a lot more familiar/comfortable with their computers, and perhaps it would also have inspired future generations not to constantly redesign things. Just as Apple became an inspiration for designers; it could have been the other side of that coin.
It's fun to think about.
http://www.microwindows.org/
I remember buying the very first iPad for my mom. One thing that she really liked was that huge, prominent physical button that you could press to immediately go to the home screen. No matter which app she ended up in and how confusing it was, the safe place was always there within easy reach. It made her that much more confident to actually go and explore.
Now, she's supposed to slide from the bottom edge, I suppose. Except if you don't do it vigorously enough, it doesn't actually bring you home. But, hey, the gadget is now 15mm shorter!
"Ah but hieroglyph icons of today scale better!" Well, hieroglyph icons of today scale consistently, but remember the icon designers back in the day would make different sizes of each icon to be clearly recognizable at all scales (the whole point of the .ico format!), and to me that is way better than what we have now.
Actually I doubt this. But the very simple, dumb icons probably scale more cleanly.
Look at those Windows 3.1/95/98/ME/2K/XP/Vista/7 icons: They have character. You try and tell me they didn't have fun drawing the icons for MS Agent and Dr. Watson; the fun and sense of humor the devs and artists had making them just ooze out.
Modern day hieroglyphs? They aim to not confuse or offend anyone, and end up impressing noone. They aim to speak all languages and end up speaking nothing. They aim to inform everyone and end up informing noone.
Immense character; there were Easter eggs when you zoomed in on any one of those icons. Now everything is a flat dreary mess.
They look nice and skeumorphic. Flat design is just lazy design and makes things hard for users.
My parents no longer understand what's a button and what isn't. They find modern desktops really confusing.
I hate modern desktops so much I just pretend they don't exist and run bare X with tiled windows, usually one only and fullscreen.
I would disagree as to the supposed 'aims'. Most flat designers don't aim to do anything - they just kept mindlessless repeating the mantra of 'minimalism' to the point where everything looks the same.
Your use of the word 'hieroglyphs' I think is very apt - because that's what they are: hieroglyphs, and NOT icons, as earlier versions of Windows had them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow
MOOF!!!
https://iconarchive.com/show/be-box-icons-by-be-os.html
https://github.com/mdomlop/retrosmart-icon-theme/blob/master...
Instead of replacing them with vague minimalist symbols.
Gradients on buttons to make them appear rounded and clickable are dead these days. Nothing suggests the maximize/minimize/close buttons are buttons anymore other than being abstract looking symbols that are otherwise out of place (at least until you hover over them).
Hiding all scrollbars is totally the trend these days, so the only way to know that something is scrollable is either by trying to scroll it, or noticing cut off content. If the window is sized just right so no content is cut off, it is easy to not realize scrolling is even possible until you eventually do it accidentally.
Those sorts of icons just don't fit into this type of usability harming hyper minimalism that was largely intended to save precious screen space on small mobile devices, but which are simply moronic on full sized computers. sigh
except i doubt that's the entire story, because even though pixel art doesn't scale well, you could make very nice, detailed, inspired, responsive vector graphics using SVG, which would scale up or down to any size. but that probably would cost way too much money to produce, so we're now in the era where companies have brazenly embraced 'phoning it in' as an aesthetic (e.g. material icons, bootstrap, font awesome, etc.). so far, users have either put up with it, or have been tricked into embracing it too
[0] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon...
[0] http://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsiv...
Folks look at the cool designs from that era (and late '90s Windows) and want them back. You can't have that and $0.99 apps. If you try to get that kind of design with today's design budgets, you get exactly the kind of Y2K photo app skeumorphic design that everyone hated.
The hieroglyphic-style icons remain sharp and distinct at most resolutions and densities. You also need to keep in mind the icon sets you mentioned (Material etc) are meant to be used by third parties. They're sort of indistinct and non-offensive because they're supposed to work with a site's branding. The icons are not supposed to be a site's branding. Windows' icons were part of the Windows product branding.
On theming: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
It works best with Ubuntu Mate. With Ubuntu Gnome it will work but not so integrated.
Try setting up alt + right click, or windows + right click to resize the windows. I have AltDrag installed on Windows, and I can grab my windows anywhere to move or resize.
Out of the box, the extra window title height took up too much room, ugh. But then now there's so much whitespace everywhere.
Win2K was the first one for which I've heard about it personally, probably because that's when it started to show up en masse in developed markets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Product_Activation
Let's rephrase @endgame's comment as "Windows XP and Office XP were the first versions of their respective series where product activation was mandatory on all retail editions." Point still stands I guess.
8 gutted the Windows theme engine because most of it wasn't needed to render flat squares and it still has yet to recover.
And one more click to disable the XP-style control panel.
OTOH app compatibility in XP was quite a bit better, esp. with games. IIRC that's when Windows first started to experiment with features like virtualized disk and registry writes?
How confusing they are has more to do with the complexity of the operation they symbolize than the design of the icon itself.
Naming is hard. Symbolizing is hard. Normalizing operations is not hard. I don't blame modern icons. I blame poor abstractions driven by marketing becoming the norm.
Nevertheless, the real issue is more that "saving" isn't really something you do any more; almost all apps now autosave and restore on restart, such that the real action that needs an icon isn't "save"; it's the option you get when you indicate you'd like to close an open, but unnamed project/document without quitting the application: "give this project/document a name."
Personally i never made the association until almost 2 decades after using computers with radio button elements, despite growing up having a monochrome TV that had actual "radio buttons" (or TV buttons in that case, which probably helped to avoid the association :-P).
And most people know what a phonograph/gramophone is without ever seeing one in person. I don't think a floppy icon will confuse anyone if they know it is for saving and is consistently used as the "saving icon", regardless of if they've seen a real floppy disk or not :-).
[0] https://i.imgur.com/511OME5.jpg
Also i think those might be on their way out, the last fan i bought had a touch buttons (not screen) - and yeah, i often did mis-tap the button i wanted :-/
It is just something you will learn interacting to after using computer for some time.
The custom representation for that icon is "an arrow pointing into a half-opened folder".
Try adding a `* {image-rendering: 'pixelated'}` in dev tools and you can see these icons in their true glory.
Pixelated rendering is closest to the design intent IMO.
Gallery of screenshots
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win2000advserv
Honestly, the cd player is quite understated there...
Relevant: demo of this in Computer Chronicles' Windows 98 episode: https://youtu.be/N3s0_yf2mS4?t=1022
Is there a Gnome or KDE theme or clone inspired by Windows 2000? Windows 8, 10, and 11 are simply offensive in comparison. I kept and open mind but still haven't come around to liking any version, not even close to W2K.
Edit: jeroenhd, this is superb, thank you for sharing! Also the BMW 7-series from 1998-1999 was one of the best ever. Every subsequent one isn't nearly as good, IMO.
I've run variants of this: https://b00merang.weebly.com/desktop-themes.html on GNOME for quite some time, without putting in the effort to recreate the start menu. My coworkers definitely looked at me weird for my Windows XP theme but it felt very nostalgic. Small details are off, though, unless you go in manually and tweak the CSS even further to correct for the differences between the author's DE and yours.
For LXDE, this project: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 goes further than just a theme, restyling some common utilities as well. It's not Windows 95, but if you'd told me it was designed around that time I would've believed you.
This post: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/tijkr3/plasma_wel... shows a very good KDE Plasma theme. Some icons are Win98, though, so you may need to replace those for the authentic look and feel.
What I myself would love is for someone to make a proper Windows 7 Aero theme for Linux. The icon sets and the backwards compatibility themes are available everywhere, but there's no Aero theme that's not jarring. In a perfect world, I'd like the frosted glass effect as well, but that's probably too much to ask. I've thrown some Windows DLLs into Ghidra to try and find the frosted glass theme engine code, but I had no idea where to look and couldn't find anything.
Windows 2000 will always be my favorite Windows, but XP with Watercolor is the best looking, imho.
0 - https://www.deviantart.com/alecu222/art/Watercolor-4-3-Visua...
I wonder sometimes just how much effort went into manually hinting it at all the standard UI sizes to make it pixel-perfect.
Every six months or so I look for the ability to skin Windows 10 to look like this, or like Windows Classic at least. It seems to be largely impossible.
Coincidentally "Professional" was a code name for the theme, I guess making Luna "Home"? Glad there's a signed copy: https://archive.org/details/winxp-watercolor
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/gnome220redhat9
I always assumed the latter because it feels like a “we need to be different but throw a tiny bit of shade while we’re at it.”
https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-inf...
Now I'm curious what Microsoft did Between 1984 and 1995. Time to go boot up Windows 3.1.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/
Compare these to the AWS icon set, which are just lines on a single-color square: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/
current icon set used by AWS is way better than the "3D" icons they had earlier
I think having "lines on a square" can also be converted to SVG.
In fact AWS page you linked does have an "Assets Package" download that included both PNG and SVG icons for both light and dark backgrounds.
the "single-color square" is actually a gradient fill too -- whether that is better is subjective.
I have always felt the need for an API that serves the correct icon in chosen resolution and format. we recently saw a HN post that argued that architecture diagrams should be code. this would be one necessary step towards that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18953542 (358 comments)
Some good nuggets of timeless insights.
In comparison, 1998 was 25 years ago, and that did feel like it was a long time.
This is an article about the design of Windows 98 icons. You’re complaining about two emojis in 2023.
I really have to wonder about the thought process that sees “iconography” and immediately goes to “can you believe Apple made a pregnant man emoji?!?”. It’s exhausting.
I would say Man in Business Suit Levitating is a more bewildering emoji, since men can't levitate no matter which suit they wear.
If that emoji is worth keeping then why not have a pregnant man emoji?
The other is a product of pandering and crazy talk.
Spot on. No sane person would ever say they saw a man in business suit levitating in their driveway. That emoji is a textbook case of pandering to mental ilness, treating hallucinations as some spiritual journey bullshit, rather than the health problem it trully is. It's literally crazy talk.
Not sure about the wicked sense of humor in the other one but it is hard to convey humor in the form of imagery so...
If ease of implementation was the sole driving factor then why are all the handshake emojis skin tones that actually exist, stands to reason it would be just as easy to flip some color codes and have every possible skin tone from green to orange shaking hands. Where's my alien-shaking-hands-with-oompa-loompa emoji dammit?
I personally don't care, and Apple is more than welcome to promote whatever messages they want on their private platform. But let's not pretend it's apolitical.
The whole point of Unicode and emoji in Unicode is to support and enable free expression for the whole world. It makes sense to lean inclusive.
I'd rather say that corporations are amoral, not political. They are only seemingly political to the degree that it benefits the business the most. On a broader scale, you can observe that they behave differently in different regions, and behavior also differs on a larger time scale, often molding to the current times.
https://blog.emojipedia.org/why-is-there-a-pregnant-man-emoj...
Edit: Also, aren't you undermining your own argument? If your standpoint that blandness and seeking to avoid offense is a bad thing, then surely the more weird and edgy emoji, the better.
I generally agree that modern attempts to "unify" the design of icons usually go to far, but if you think Windows 98 icons are strictly better than say Windows 11 icons, that seems like rose coloured glasses to me.
The good ones are good, but the bad ones are worse. Although I do understand the appeal, and subjectively I do like them better.
For one, we don't have a "start" button anymore, we have a four square thing which you're suppose to just know to click. If I want to get to the control panel I have to erm... Search for it on the four squared menu thing? I'm not even sure there is a "proper" way to navigate there anymore, instead you just need to know there is a thing called the "control panel" and search for it. And even then you're never 100% sure if you want the "control panel" or "settings". And why do these two interfaces have completely different UIs? It's like the whole OS is designed to be as confusing as possible. If I didn't have experience with prior versions of Windows I'm not sure I'd even know how to do the most basic things.
The control panel is depreciated and remains for compatibility reasons and is deliberately hidden in favour of the settings button, which uses the now familiar gear icon.
This is just wrong haha. Here's a raymond chen post:
> But one thing kept getting kicked up by usability tests: People booted up the computer and just sat there, unsure what to do next.
> That’s when we decided to label the System button “Start”.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030722-00/?p=43...
Edit: I hope this comment doesn't come off as rude or anything too :). I just remember reading about this in Raymond's book and the fact that the start menu originally didn't say start stuck out to me.
Microsoft feels that it has no choice but to follow fashion trends and I am not sure that they're wrong to do so. Eventually minimalist UIs will go out of fashion and utilitarian evidence-based UIs may come back. But for now, the fashion is what it is and if companies want new users, they must follow the trend.
Regarding the hodge-podge of different UI designs, I think that that is just a function of UI/UX designers not being honest with themselves and others about whether they're doing engineering, psychology or fashion. Fashion must change for the sake of change but engineering and psychology do not. This creates inconsistencies.
Apparently, Microsoft is way ahead of you.
Each time OS vendors update their UI, they add more white space and make the UI flatter. The old always complain but I just found the new design more comfortable and intuitive to use.
It is a one way trip. I can't get back to old, traditional IDE after trying the more modern VS Code.
I love the W11 design, best looking one so far. Usability is not bad. W7's was better in some regards, worse in others. I hated W10 design. Usability was poor. W7 design was nice. Usability was good. Windows XP design was ugly. Usability was nice. Windows 98 was ugly. Usability was ok for the time.
The others in between are not worth mentioning.
The only semi usable flat theme under *nix it's Zukitre GTK2/3 theme with, maybe, the Newaita icons or similar. Everything else lacks lots of contrast.
Themes are used for borders. Every program has its own UI. Even on MS Windows.
Not acknowledging that other people have other taste that doesn't necessarily match with a person's personal preference is wrong in my opinion.
Unix had brilliant points, too: Virtual desktops and moving/resizing with alt or super_l and clicking the mouse with a left/right mouse click.
Thus, you can use a Unix based WM/DE (IceWM, Mate, XFCE) with the Windows 95 theming (Chicago95) AND the Unix keybindings, having the best of the both worlds since Icewm was created from long ago.
I will just ignore your thick-headed comment from this point, it's clear that you're not arguing in good faith.
Boring sound like a good UI quality to me. I don't want UI to be entertaining and full of surprises, I want a job to be done.
Having worked at many companies over the years I feel like you are giving Microsoft way more credit than it probably deserves.
Politics plays a huge role in decision making, and in my experience, when it comes to UI/UX, politics accounts for 80% or more of choices.
I find it really hard to convince myself that Windows' scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign on top of each other is the result of careful planning and research.
I'm sure they do the research, and look at feedback. I just don't think it has any bearing on decision making.
Separately, I didn't say anything about "careful planning", I only said "research". And that the research is telling them to make the UIs look flat and non-skeuomorphic.
> scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign
No one here claimed that they succeeded ;-)
I also think the fashion theory is wrong. In fact, it’s backward. Younger users didn’t demand these regressions; they’re simply more used to lazy, shitty design and the absence of the visual cues and standards that made GUIs so intuitive in the first place. So, for example, they are more likely to tap or click on a plain text label to see if it’s a control than those of us who expect controls to be demarcated as such. But once those regressions become the norm, the better designs are indeed recognizable as “older.”
Thus we all suffer a decline in design quality. Windows is now an unmitigated UI shítshow.
Fortunately we’re finally seeing some backlash against “flat” (AKA no) design.
I think the goal is very much the same today, but the people first using a computer have probably already experienced Android or iOS. Computers are now for serious business and maybe high-end video games, the rest is done on phones and tablets. The world has gone mobile first so for beginners to pick up Windows, Windows needs to be "mobile-compatible". Icons are flat and abstract, buttons are big without borders, and half your screen being filled with UI is not bad as long as you full screen that important content when it matters.
I don't think the clarity of older operating systems needs to go away per se, but people's expectations have dropped significantly with small touch screen devices and designers love showing off how "clean" their design looks.
Without the ability to hover over an icon with a cursor there's often no way to tell what it will do, and apps usually don't include any help pages.
Copying the mobile UI is definitely a bad direction, but it's a very understandable one from a business sense and it's the only explanation I can really think of when it comes to Windows 11's iconography and design.
Rape is also an experience. A negative one.
And Android or iOS are not computers (just like a TV or a washing machine are not computers). They are specialized entertainment devices designed to extract data from the users.
I was shocked how unintuitive and sometimes insane that software has turned to. It's basically useless. After spending hours trying to sort the emails, we decided to just back them up and delete everything. My friend moved to Gmail.
I wonder what happened? Old Outlook while having some shortcomings was a manageable piece of software, whereas the new one is completely unusable. Other Microsoft software suffer the same problems like Teams. I feel sorry for any workplace that is using any Microsoft software. There are exceptions like VSCode, but given how things work at Microsoft, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode turned into crap nobody wants to use anymore.
They call it the Ribbon. A collections of icons (or as someone said, hyeroglyphs) arranged in who knows what order, which you need to guess what they do. Some have text, some not.
And "Start" has been gone for over 15 years. It transformed into the "Windows logo button" with Vista in 2006. The menu's naming was kept (and still is) but "Start" as text hasn't been a thing for a long time.
"Google and Apple does it so it must be good"
"Tablets and phones are the future."
"Users don't want to be bothered"
"We know better"
I show it to my wife (who's just 5 years younger), and she's like: "No.".
[1]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/win98-icons-1.png
[2]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/project-windows98-icons.png
Recently I have noticed that I am also beginning to struggle seeing the window borders in Windows 10. If design trends continue I may also soon be unable to operate my laptop :-(. I appreciate that MacOS hasn't gone as crazy as Window.
Everything is so sterile and “modern” as others have mentioned.
Two computers connected by a pipe of sorts. The computers are two different colors, immediately telling you they are two separate entities (not a clone).
The pipe has a bright yellow notch.
Just perfection, damn! I wonder where the team is now and what they're designing. Anyone know?