It's extra noise because of the fad for samey B&W icons (instigated by the ease of implementing dark mode). With judicious use of color, there can be more visual distinction where the menus guide you to the intended target by visual memory without having to process the text.
Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
101–110 of 340 posts
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#102From the article: "What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines..." Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.
I think the problem might be generational… the only people who know - or care - about the HIG are older millennials
yearning for old apple and order, current times and genz are more chaotic. not sure if it's generational, old apple was obsessed about design, now HIG is mostly optional. they now even use hamburger on websites which was a big no in the past.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#103From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal. Also, I disagree with: > This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought: > Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt…
Yes, I agree. Maybe if you’re a fast reader icons don’t do much, but for people who are illiterate (20% of America) they figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons.
Is this just your belief presented as fact, or do you have some data to back this up?
(Not the literacy stat but the fact that illiterate people "figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons").
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#104There was a comic artist I used to follow when I was doing more front end work, who would blog about his craft. One of the things he said that really hit me was talking about silhouettes. The visual noise in certain eras of comics make them very unapproachable. If you repainted your strip by flood filling everything with black, would people have any clue what's going on? One of the things I'm seeing in some of these…
macOS Tahoe has declared war on app icons with distinctive shapes. No silhouettes. If your icon isn't a squircle, it will be shrunk to fit inside a default shape. The penalty box. https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/6/2.html The loss of icon silhouettes is a big step down in usability. Erases decades of design guidelines. https://pxlnv.com/blog/roundrect-dictator/ Frankly it's senseless. https://www.flarup.email…
> macOS isn't fun anymore.
It was always closed source. That hasn’t changed. That should be a hint.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#105There was a comic artist I used to follow when I was doing more front end work, who would blog about his craft. One of the things he said that really hit me was talking about silhouettes. The visual noise in certain eras of comics make them very unapproachable. If you repainted your strip by flood filling everything with black, would people have any clue what's going on? One of the things I'm seeing in some of these…
macOS Tahoe has declared war on app icons with distinctive shapes. No silhouettes. If your icon isn't a squircle, it will be shrunk to fit inside a default shape. The penalty box. https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/6/2.html The loss of icon silhouettes is a big step down in usability. Erases decades of design guidelines. https://pxlnv.com/blog/roundrect-dictator/ Frankly it's senseless. https://www.flarup.email…
First we lost the pinstripes, then brushed aluminium; then we lost colors in the sidebar icons. Then they made everything flat.
Finally we lost the background and legibility.
Pepe prayge now than Alan is out that things will improve.
We need to get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles for good design.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#106In earlier versions of Apple OSes, you could edit the menus yourself, with the officially supplied resource file editor app and there was nothing really special about it.
There are `ibtool` and `plutil` CLI commands built-in to macOS these days too, but to get some graphical editor, u would need to download 3GB of Xcode and u would invalidate the code signatures, etc...
Plus there is a huge churn in the application versions, so any customizations would need to be applied repeatedly to newer app versions.
Sad, really...
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#107This 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,…
>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.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguably.
I could care less! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820457 https://web.archive.org/web/20150406073147/https://jarretthe...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/03/why-i-could-care-le...
I tend to assume that anyone who objects to “I could care less” has never lived in the New York City area. See the mention of Yiddish in the above link. But for some who object to it, that’s the issue: it’s a shibboleth of a culture they’re not part of.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#109Somewhat tangential: > What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines (as pointed out to me by Peter Gassner). > They have an entire section in their 2005 guidelines titled “Using Symbols in Menus” 2005?? Guidelines evolve.
Here's from 2020:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201027235952/https://developer...
> Use text, not icons, for menu titles. Only menu bar extras use icons to represent menus. See Menu Bar Extras. It’s also not acceptable to use a mixture of text and icons in menu titles.
> Avoid using custom symbols in menus. People are familiar with the standard symbols. Using nonstandard symbols introduces visual clutter and could confuse the user.
The notable thing here is how recent of a shift this is, and how longstanding the prior rule was. Navigating internet archive is slow/tedious, but I think the rule/guideline was explicitly called out in the guidelines up until a year or two ago. So it was probably the guideline for ~20 years on macOS and has just now been changed.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#110Simply put: icons in menus are helpful to me.
Deal with it.