alt Hacker News> 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.)
Nobody is mentioning that there’s essentially nowhere you see the icon now without the name (internationalized) unless you’re already familiar with it, and pinned it to a launcher or something.
The first time you see most of them they’re on a page with screenshots and descriptions.
Nobody needs to know what the Word icon is before they know what Word is.