61–70 of 340 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In practice, "egregious" in English never means very good
It used to!
I actually like the icons from his example of Google Docs, it makes it easy for me to locate an action type I’m looking for (add/delete etc) without reading the labels, then once I narrowed it down - I can read the label to find the precise action I want.
From 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.
Icons in menus do follow the 2025 HIG: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... The author is criticising 2025 macOS for not following the 2005 HIG. This is not reasonable criticism, the HIG are not set in stone and they have changed many times in the past 20 years.
2014:
"Avoid displaying an icon for every menu item. If you include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read."
Newer versions seem to have escaped being properly archived anywhere, so Apple can gaslight us all into believing the HIG has never changed, that we have always been at war with East Asia, that giving a bad icon to every single menu icon has always been good, and that rule was never arbitrarily changed at the whims of a cardboard box designer and his liquid glarse aesthetics.
It works out though because it does give me ammo when people use these guidelines to thoughtlessly defend poor design as if they are axiomatic rules. For 20+ years having lots of icons in a menu was bad...but now...it's good! Why? I dunno! It just is!
There 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…
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/p/through-the-liquid-glass
Insane but still working legacy workaround:
https://simonbs.dev/posts/how-to-bring-back-oddly-shaped-app...
…
macOS isn't fun anymore.
The examples he showed, I didn’t mind. From the title, I thought he might be referring to the emojis in READMEs. Those annoy me and don’t add anything. (I assume all vibe-coded)
I honestly really like that this has a tell-tale and hope we maintain this convention.
If the author didn't care about their project enough to write the README themselves, I don't usually spend the energy to consider the project at that point.
I changed the UX in my mobile app from text only to icon + text by default in menus, buttons, and links. There are several reasons I made the switch, but the primary reason is that it makes it easier to build a kind of muscle memory for navigating and performing particular actions. In essence, the text is there for new users and the icons are there for experienced users.
It's kind of a shame how we keep trying to make icons look uniform, either in color, or in shape. Like I open the app drawer on my Android phone and there are like 16 different icons, all different Google apps, all are round and various abstract configurations of the same exact four colors. Feels like we're falling into the same trap that Gothic handwriting did with the minims. Yeah it looks very pretty but it's almo…
The recent Android releases where everything is a squircle really sucks too.
The explanation for why they do it is pretty simple: localization hinting. From country to country, the text will change but the icon pictures won't. So if you find some how-tos or guidance online that has screenshots but wasn't made in your language, you can still follow along by lining up the icons.
There are other reasons too but that's a big one.