I get what they're trying to say, but I don't think a 14yo with their first Mac is going to know what an inkwell represents. Let alone what an inkwell is.
It looks like someone getting good at illustration. Older icons are far better illustrations. However icon design is not just about illustration, it's about clarity and affordances. Icons don't exist in isolation like an illustration, they exist alongside the rest of the UX and other app icons, and being recognisable is important.
All that to say, the sweet pot was likely somewhere in the middle of this timeline. The earliest icons aren't recognisable enough as they're too illustrative. The later icons aren't recognisable enough because they're too basic. The middle are pretty, clear from colour, clear from shape, well branded.
I think it depends on size. If the icon is very small, I like the simple ones. If the icon is large, I like the detailed ones. Optimally, you can have an icon with more detailed versions when displayed larger, but it remains the same icon.
I'm sure design theory says the new ones are better, but the very first one was much clearer for users. Also on the phone I could say "click on the ink with the pen".
Icon design is actually really interesting because good icons are an attractor in a phase space defined by the expectations of the users of those icons. An icon doesn’t need to look like the action it represents. It needs to evoke the concept of the action when the user sees it. So in a perfect world the icon evolves towards the user’s expectation while the user learns their expectation based on the icon.
Man I fucking hate this trend in icon design where they've both become so insanely basic and also tried to be "consistent" with all the icons to the point of being useless. Google started this a while back with their app icons on Android, where they all have some basic shape and the Google colors and it still sucks trying to find the right one. The horrendous icon theming users are able to do only makes it worse, reducing them to two-color versions.
Microsoft did this okay until their recent liquid glass redesign, which just went further into colored blob territory.
I understand some people like skeuomorphism and that's fine. But I've noticed a certain arrogance skeuomorphism fans tend to have as if it's THE right way to design and everyone else is wrong.
It seems like user interfaces should be decoupled from functionality of applications. Someone should be able to freeze their user interface in time if they wish.
Between this, and icon-only toolbars and ribbons, I think we're reinventing Chinese, badly. Ideographic characters can often convey meaning succinctly.
My vote is to either go back to picture icons, or use Chinese characters with localized pronunciation, so 車 or 车 is car, and so on.
My sister is switching to macOS and she won’t be able to tell this is a word app. She won’t be able to notice it with the ink bottle either. These represent the pen when ideally they should represent the document which is what the word app does. I have to admit Microsoft office apps actually have / have had sensible icons.
It's been so long since I used a mac that I don't recognize any of these icons (or maybe it's a iPad thing?)
What app is it even for? The middle one looks like writing something. The left ones look like drawing a line or testing/calibrating a stylus? The inkpot? I don't even. And the two on the middle right look like desktop publishing?
Oh hi everyone! So funny to see how my quippy little tweet blew up the last few days on all the platforms (much more than when I share actual things I make, to my great dismay - if you're an artist/photographer, check out my apps & tools: https://heliographe.studio).
There's lots of interesting discussions to be had around what makes a great icon (but social media platforms aren't the places to have those deep conversations). For example the original Mac HIG says that an app icon should:
- clearly represent the document the application creates
- use graphics that convey meaning about what your application does
The first point might be a little outdated, as we tend to live in a "post-document" world, especially on mobile. The second is broad enough that it holds up, and under that lens it doesn't seem that an image of a pen/stylus is most appropriate for a word processor app.
By that metric, the Mavericks/Catalina (5th and 6th on the linked image) seem like the strongest icons. The Big Sur (4th) one isn't too bad given the "must fit in a squircle constraints" that came with it, but it starts to feel less like a word processor app icon - it could as easily be an icon for TextEdit/Notes.
The most recent 3 are very hard to defend - the main thing they have going for them is that because they are simpler and monochromatic, they fit more easily within a broader design system/icon family. Even then, the simpler shape doesn't make them more legible - a number of people have told me they thought it was a bandaid at first, or maybe something terminal-related for the orange on black one. The "line" under the pencil (or is it a shadow?) on the most recent one is almost as thick as the pencil itself, and blends with it because gestalt theory.
I agree that the 7th one (original ink bottle) has a few issues that don't necessarily make it the best choice for an icon - but dang, the level of craft that goes into it makes it an instant classic for me. And it does retain a fairly distinct, legible shape that still makes it a solid icon even if the detail gets lost at smaller sizes.
Icons need to be quickly recognizable, but at the same time an icon is not a glyph - and illustrational approach do have their place. Especially on devices with larger screens where they are going to appear quite large in most contexts.
The big elephant in the room with all this is that icons 5/6/7 clearly take more craft skill to execute than icons 1/2/3, and Apple used to be the absolute reference - no debate possible - when it came to these matters. As a long time software designer (and former Apple designer myself through the 2010s, although I was on the hardware interaction design side, and not making icons), it is sad that this is no longer true.
Apple mostly cares about legibility and consistency in icons now, not art. All the new iOS features like tints and liquid glass don't lend themselves well to intricate designs. It's disappointing, but I tend to agree that the skeuomorphic icons are harder to read.
From their icon guidelines:
"Embrace simplicity in your icon design. Simple icons tend to be easiest for people to understand and recognize. An icon with fine visual features might look busy when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights..."
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Self plug, but I made an app related to this - it's a conceptual art gallery for app icons. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to remove the functional premise and just let an icon be a decorative symbol. It's called 001 (https://001.graphics)
Strangely, the new Preview app icon on iOS is quite skeuomorphic and depicting something almost nobody ever needs to do anymore in the last few decades (looking at small negatives or positives throughly a magnifying glass, or maybe micro documents?)
There was more meeting time and salary budget involved in picking the yellow-red gradient inside a pen from the first icon on the left, that in the entire process of creating and releasing the icon first from the right.
Off-topic, I guess, but on-screen icons are not the only things you have to puzzle about. On my quite new Asus laptop (which I really like) there is a key on the keyboard that launches Asus's My Asus application, which does hardware-specific configuration. I like the app, I like easy access to it - what I don't understand is why the label on the key is "//]".
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 53.5 ms ] threadAll that to say, the sweet pot was likely somewhere in the middle of this timeline. The earliest icons aren't recognisable enough as they're too illustrative. The later icons aren't recognisable enough because they're too basic. The middle are pretty, clear from colour, clear from shape, well branded.
What? The fact that they have a unique silhouette alone make them so much more recognizable than all the other versions.
Microsoft did this okay until their recent liquid glass redesign, which just went further into colored blob territory.
The worst are the icons that rely on the user using a previous version of the app to understand the very abstract version of the icon used today. See: https://mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/115072885331562510
My vote is to either go back to picture icons, or use Chinese characters with localized pronunciation, so 車 or 车 is car, and so on.
What app is it even for? The middle one looks like writing something. The left ones look like drawing a line or testing/calibrating a stylus? The inkpot? I don't even. And the two on the middle right look like desktop publishing?
There's lots of interesting discussions to be had around what makes a great icon (but social media platforms aren't the places to have those deep conversations). For example the original Mac HIG says that an app icon should:
- clearly represent the document the application creates
- use graphics that convey meaning about what your application does
(https://www.threads.com/@heliographe.studio/post/DTehlciE3wY)
The first point might be a little outdated, as we tend to live in a "post-document" world, especially on mobile. The second is broad enough that it holds up, and under that lens it doesn't seem that an image of a pen/stylus is most appropriate for a word processor app.
By that metric, the Mavericks/Catalina (5th and 6th on the linked image) seem like the strongest icons. The Big Sur (4th) one isn't too bad given the "must fit in a squircle constraints" that came with it, but it starts to feel less like a word processor app icon - it could as easily be an icon for TextEdit/Notes.
The most recent 3 are very hard to defend - the main thing they have going for them is that because they are simpler and monochromatic, they fit more easily within a broader design system/icon family. Even then, the simpler shape doesn't make them more legible - a number of people have told me they thought it was a bandaid at first, or maybe something terminal-related for the orange on black one. The "line" under the pencil (or is it a shadow?) on the most recent one is almost as thick as the pencil itself, and blends with it because gestalt theory.
I agree that the 7th one (original ink bottle) has a few issues that don't necessarily make it the best choice for an icon - but dang, the level of craft that goes into it makes it an instant classic for me. And it does retain a fairly distinct, legible shape that still makes it a solid icon even if the detail gets lost at smaller sizes.
Icons need to be quickly recognizable, but at the same time an icon is not a glyph - and illustrational approach do have their place. Especially on devices with larger screens where they are going to appear quite large in most contexts.
The big elephant in the room with all this is that icons 5/6/7 clearly take more craft skill to execute than icons 1/2/3, and Apple used to be the absolute reference - no debate possible - when it came to these matters. As a long time software designer (and former Apple designer myself through the 2010s, although I was on the hardware interaction design side, and not making icons), it is sad that this is no longer true.
From their icon guidelines: "Embrace simplicity in your icon design. Simple icons tend to be easiest for people to understand and recognize. An icon with fine visual features might look busy when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights..." https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Self plug, but I made an app related to this - it's a conceptual art gallery for app icons. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to remove the functional premise and just let an icon be a decorative symbol. It's called 001 (https://001.graphics)
The one in the middle is probably what I would gravitate towards myself. The right three really wear their date on their sleeve.