This a really interesting and persuasive read for me. I've been thinking about this topic as part of brainstorming a simple design system and I had come to the conclusion that the inconsistency of not having icons for every menu item was a big annoyance. After seeing how descriptive the icons are in older menu examples compared to the abstract blobs in newer menus, I have to admit I might be wrong. At the very least, ensuring that the icons themselves are as illustrative as possible about the intended outcome of its selection is necessary.

It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better.

I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?

>It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item.

It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.

Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.

Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.

Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.

> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?

It's a symbol, it could be a 7-pointed star and people would associate it with Save.

Even when you knew what a floppy disk was, why would you push that button? You haven't seen a floppy in years, don't have a floppy drive and don't want to create a floppy disk.

FWIW: Apple’s SF Symbols font doesn’t have an image of a floppy disk, nor does it have an icon meaning “save”.

Check out how Blender’s entire UI (menus, buttons, hotkeys, pie menus, toolbar tools, context menus, etc) is built on a single abstraction: operators -- universal command objects that can be used in many contexts.

Every operator has:

Identifier: mesh.extrude_region_move

Label: human-readable string, like "Extrude Region"

Description: tooltip text, like "Extrude selected vertices, edges or faces along their normals"

Icon: optional enum from Blender’s built-in icon set, like ICON = 'MESH_EXTRUDE_REGION'

RNA properties: parameters / flags like direction, axis, booleans

Poll function: whether it is available in current context, like only enabled when a mesh is in edit mode

Execution logic: the actual command code

Blender’s designers generally follow these principles:

Operators always have labels. Icons are optional. Most menu items use no icon by default. Only well-established visual operations (cursor, transform tools, viewport shading modes, etc.) get icons.

Unlike macOS Tahoe’s vague "everything gets an icon" ideology, Blender uses icons when they convey meaning, but not when they’re decorative filler.

> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?

This is a pet peeve of mine and it feels like some cargo cult within the UI design "field". There's nothing wrong with the floppy icon. It's perfectly fine. Even if someone doesn't get it, the consistency of its use across apps is enough for its meaning to be clear, which is what really matters.

I think local save is usually the floppy and cloud save is usually a cloud icon . The semantics change a bit when the app in question is a cloud app though.