I'd love to go to schools and get kids in groups like Or maybe they've learned all these icons and while not getting what they did mean, they understand what they mean now, like letters of a new alphabet. Like how many Asian script characters are descendants of more obvious pictograms of actions. They still have meaning even if they've evolved a bit and even changed.
Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
21–30 of 279 posts
Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
#22While I support the point behind this article, some of them are... not on point. > Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool they've never used in their lives. What have screwdrivers and wrenches been replaced with?
Who cares? A floppy disk nowadays is the thing that indicates "save", and that's it. You don't have to have seen a floppy disk to know that it's the save icon. If that were the case, company logos would be objects. A swoosh is Nike, and that's that.
Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
#23The floppy disk icon has always frustrated me. Though I still haven't seen a great replacement. Would love to see this list with more thoughtful options to use instead.
the floppy disk icon for saving is a bit of an anachronism, but so is saving. there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of value in re-imagining the icon for an action that is mostly unnecessary in modern apps.
Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
#24The irony is that there's a concurrent and opposite reaction to the non-traditional new icons used on Github.
The simple reason the save icon still looks like a floppy disk is because everyone expects it to look like that.
Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
#25Is this from the future? We still save to disks... sure the media has changed, but we're doing the same task.
After reviewing the author, filed under: Comedy!
Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
#26wow, I never knew that "radio button" meant that - I sort of imagined that they were checkboxes that had walkie talkies with eachother?
Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
#27I'd love to go to schools and get kids in groups like Or maybe they've learned all these icons and while not getting what they did mean, they understand what they mean now, like letters of a new alphabet. Like how many Asian script characters are descendants of more obvious pictograms of actions. They still have meaning even if they've evolved a bit and even changed.
UI designers are constantly forced to come up with new icons for crazy new features.
It's a common practice to look for it on Google images, i.e. "Save Icon", and see if there's a common metaphor. If not, you look for similar use cases - something so that it's much quicker for users to grok what it does.
That's the fundamental purpose after all.
This was the problem with Google/Android's new icons as well as GitHub. Google got caught up with minimization and left out the telling differentiators. Githup went nuts on illustration and lost the original meanings.
Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
#28The floppy disk icon has always frustrated me. Though I still haven't seen a great replacement. Would love to see this list with more thoughtful options to use instead.
Why would a perfectly suitable icon ever be replaced?
When something else becomes iconic that replaces it.
Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
#29The idea that people don't know what a cog or a wrench is seems like the author is taking this a step too far. I wouldn't call those things "shrouded in mystery". Similarly there are still plenty of microphones that look like that, they're professional microphones, not "old fashioned" ones.
Plus, once a reference is established (like the floppy disk) it's idiotic to always replace it with the latest tech (we'd have zip drives in the nineties, usb drives in the '00s, the cloud today, etc etc..)
We might similarly go to another extreme and phase out the use of 'alpha' and 'beta', or just the ancient Greek alphabet altogether.
It's thousands of years old, thus despite our ability to record and learn from history, we should replace it with something more modern.
Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
#30Clipboards are are everywhere: sexy business men and ladies in movies; gym coaches; bitchy stage managers; kids use them in school occasionally, etc.