Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Old Icons

leancrew.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 31 posts

Re: Old Icons

#21

Post by lopis »

riffraff wrote: post #4
ofalkaed wrote: post #3

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.

I think icons are nice, but using icons instead of labels, is a terrible design decision in principle. It might be acceptable for your power users, or if you know your project is only used by you and your household or something like that. My company just did this for mobile to save space. It's so confusing even though I use our product every day. Humans can read short labels faster than they can decipher icons.

Re: Old Icons

#23

Post by krige »

inigyou wrote: post #19
krige wrote: post #7

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 think the desktop is too cluttered. Icons don't stand out from the background. Window UI looks fine though.

The wallpaper is definitely busy, I couldn't say how many people even used wallpapers in that era over flat color.

Re: Old Icons

#24

Post by inigyou »

krige wrote: post #23
inigyou wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the desktop is too cluttered. Icons don't stand out from the background. Window UI looks fine though.

The wallpaper is definitely busy, I couldn't say how many people even used wallpapers in that era over flat color.

I wouldn't mind if, like, all the icons were light blue on the grey background. As is, it's grey on grey.

Re: Old Icons

#25

Post by masfuerte »

zombot wrote: post #12
riffraff wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing to do with you, but I wish I could just say "I don't believe in the thaumaturgic power of AI" to achieve a similar effect.

Say it five times into a mirror and Sam Altman will appear to deliver your pink slip.

Re: Old Icons

#27

Post by charlesrice »

dvh wrote: post #15

You are using font size wrong. I see 13 lines of text per page and most lines has single word on it. 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…

Each paragraph on this page uses the body style from style.css.

body { font-family: Georgia, Serif; font-size: 100%; background: #898; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em; }

Font size is 100%, so it will respect your font sizing. You might be doing something weird on your end.

Re: Old Icons

#28

Post by devindotcom »

lelanthran wrote: post #6
devindotcom wrote: post #5

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.

> 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, It's hard to actually tell from the images on the site (they are all really really large and you can usually only tell the quality of an icon by seeing it at the size the user would). Any chance you could make a small addition to your site so t…

heh yes I do plan on doing something like that. it was just a little hobby thing I threw together last year. I've been meaning to harmonize the styles a bit and put small versions in the body text. Putting them at pixel-perfect size though they are very small!

Re: Old Icons

#29

Post by devindotcom »

dewey wrote: post #8
devindotcom wrote: post #5

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.

She sells great prints of the original icons, I have two on my walls and I really enjoy them: https://kareprints.com

had no idea, thanks for the link.

Re: Old Icons

#30

Post by devindotcom »

lopis wrote: post #20
devindotcom wrote: post #5

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.

Nice project. The icon sizes seem a bit too inconsistent, but if that's what your projects need, I guess you must have your reasons.

oh for sure I made no attempt to make them regular, not to mention some are Kare's. I was trying to make them as small as possible but that leads to its own kind of confusion.
Post reply on HN