alt Hacker NewsApple mostly cares about legibility and consistency in icons now, not art. All the new iOS features like tints and liquid glass don't lend themselves well to intricate designs. It's disappointing, but I tend to agree that the skeuomorphic icons are harder to read.
From their icon guidelines: "Embrace simplicity in your icon design. Simple icons tend to be easiest for people to understand and recognize. An icon with fine visual features might look busy when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights..." https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Self plug, but I made an app related to this - it's a conceptual art gallery for app icons. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to remove the functional premise and just let an icon be a decorative symbol. It's called 001 (https://001.graphics)
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It feels like Apple did all of this in reverse. They created a new UI system and effects that look like shit with any amount of fine detail, and now suddenly their design guide says "actually fine details are bad for the user". They didn't come up with a good design, they came up with a shader tech demo and had to make a design that works with that new constraint.
> Apple mostly cares about legibility and consistency in icons now, not art.
The second-to-oldest one is legible. The word “PAGES” is quite legible. It’s pretty clear what’s going on. In fact, it’s the only one in the entire set where I would look at the icon and quickly recognize what it is and what it’s for. (The one that is one iteration newer is worse because it’s less legible.)
I use a Mac daily, have for years now. I did not recognize that the icon in the article was for "pages" until it came to the icon with the word pages on it.
The icon is horrible and generic and has failed to leave an impression on me over multiple years.
I disagree with Apple caring about legibility. You can have legibility in simplicity but apple isn't doing that.
Legibility requires contrast, the whole liquid glass transparent background thing kills contrast and thus legibility. Having random noise from the background windows kills legibility.
As for icons specifically - having white semitransparent (vertical gradient) shape on top of brighter color background makes it harder to perceive the shape which is currently only remaining distinguishing feature. Half of them are gray on gray. If you can't recognize the shape while squinting your eyes then it's not a good legible shape for icon. The Messages/FaceTime is other comments mentioned is one of the best/worst examples of this. In theory shape of camera and speech bubble are unique, but in practice the real difference is very small. They are both similar size elongated blobs. Messages have tiny little triangle in bottom left corner, camera has two notches. Overall and in combination with color choice this makes it harder to recognize the shape. Phone also uses the same color but at least the general shape is significantly different.
It's not all completely bad. The rainbow button strip and darker background for Audio Midi setup in my opinion made it more distinct. The contact icon also improved contrast, but only because old one had very bad contrast.
There are plenty of others where contrast was made worse. For example Time machine, Font book, Clock, Finder.