11–20 of 31 posts
I go out of my way to avoid icons everywhere possible and mostly have lived icon free since sometime around the turn of the century. I despise icons, but these old Mac icons do tug some strings, I don't hate them and may even like them, I absolutely have some serious nostalgia for the days when they were a part of my life.
I go out of my way to avoid icons everywhere possible and mostly have lived icon free since sometime around the turn of the century. I despise icons, but these old Mac icons do tug some strings, I don't hate them and may even like them, I absolutely have some serious nostalgia for the days when they were a part of my life.
I used to unthinkingly put icons everywhere. Then, once, a designer friend was doing some UI and I suggested using icons instead of edit/view text or something like that, and he replied "I don't believe in the thaumaturgic power of icons" and that somehow changed my perspective forever.
To me the pinnacle of icons was always the MagicWB [0] / MUI [1] style, even though I never really had MagicWB on my systems. Maybe strange choice of colors (pale blue, pink, orange?), but nice dithering and color interplay to create neat 3D illusion built nicely upon the OS 2.0 look. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicWB [1] http://www.sasg.com/mui/preview.gif
As for MUI, it was a fantastic system for programming user interfaces and for displaying user interfaces, and it's one of the great tragedies of computing that nothing of that calibre exists today as a cross-platform user-skinnable UI toolkit.
It was however, very slightly lacking (on the Amiga) as a system for using user interfaces because it lacked that sense of immediacy for which the Amiga's UI was previously known.
With traditional Intuition gadgets the rendering was done within a high-priority system task, so if you click on a gadget you'll get immediate visual feedback even if the application isn't ready to respond. With MUI the drawing, and thus feedback, doesn't happen until the application's paying attention. Because of that, MUI applications felt non-native. (Even Windows-like!)
That might not seem important in today's world where that level of responsiveness was burned on the altar of network backends and web presentation layers, but that sense of "having the computer's full attention" is a big part of why the Amiga still has fans today.
I go out of my way to avoid icons everywhere possible and mostly have lived icon free since sometime around the turn of the century. I despise icons, but these old Mac icons do tug some strings, I don't hate them and may even like them, I absolutely have some serious nostalgia for the days when they were a part of my life.
this is one of the most engineer comments i have ever read on hackernews. icons are symbols. you avoid all symbols?
The solution is simple. If you don't know correct font size of every visitor, don't change the font size. Each visitor will have font set according to their preference. I will have set it to medium, my grandma to xx-large, teenager with perfect vision to small, designer with 8k monitors to 150px helvetica.
If you want to retain some control over the font size, use small, medium, large. (e.g. information dense site could use small, average website like yours could use medium, and information sparse websites like wedding announcement could use large).
To me the pinnacle of icons was always the MagicWB [0] / MUI [1] style, even though I never really had MagicWB on my systems. Maybe strange choice of colors (pale blue, pink, orange?), but nice dithering and color interplay to create neat 3D illusion built nicely upon the OS 2.0 look. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicWB [1] http://www.sasg.com/mui/preview.gif
I never particularly liked the standard hard disk icons from MagicWB, but in general I really liked the aesthetic, especially the drawers with topic icons overlaid. As for MUI, it was a fantastic system for programming user interfaces and for displaying user interfaces, and it's one of the great tragedies of computing that nothing of that calibre exists today as a cross-platform user-skinnable UI toolkit. It was howe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never particularly liked the standard hard disk icons from MagicWB, but in general I really liked the aesthetic, especially the drawers with topic icons overlaid. As for MUI, it was a fantastic system for programming user interfaces and for displaying user interfaces, and it's one of the great tragedies of computing that nothing of that calibre exists today as a cross-platform user-skinnable UI toolkit. It was howe…
Hear hear. This was why I could never quite understand why there was so much love for MUI in some of the monthly Amiga magazines at the time (although I agree it looked pretty). Even on my beefed-up hardware, that general lethargic feel to the UI was noticeable. Later, ReAct came along, was even worse, and I just didn't get it.
To me the pinnacle of icons was always the MagicWB [0] / MUI [1] style, even though I never really had MagicWB on my systems. Maybe strange choice of colors (pale blue, pink, orange?), but nice dithering and color interplay to create neat 3D illusion built nicely upon the OS 2.0 look. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicWB [1] http://www.sasg.com/mui/preview.gif
obligatory susan kare mention - her icons were amazing. I started making my own small, monochrome icons for a personal project ( https://anachronomicon.coldewey.cc/ ), trying to make them reasonably small while also intelligible, and it's hard once you go below 24 pixels or so! I haven't stuck to any standard size either, but I might later. 32 seems luxurious to me now.