Old Icons

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

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 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.

An icon is kind of “visual shorthand”: a way to leverage peripheral vision and pre-attentive processing so a user can understand a control's purpose in milliseconds.

The user won't learn a UI from icons alone, but once learned, distinct icons speed up recall massively. The problem with the modern trend of hyper-homogenised, uniform icons is that they destroy this advantage. When every icon has the exact same stroke weight, color, and geometric bounding box, they blur into a useless mush.