| ▲ | hinkley 2 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 examples is icons with the same silhouette doing nothing or less than nothing for scannability. This is the same problem AWS has. Their dashboard is just noise, because the icons are neither visually distinct nor descriptive of the project. I've also seen some of this same problem with card and board games as well. You can see that some designers care about accessibility. This type has both a distinct color AND shape so colorblind people can see it, all the icons are big enough that people can make them out sitting upside down in front of the person across the table from them, even if they're over 40. His first example, Google Sheets, does well by this metric IMO, but the next few are kinda bad. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | watersb 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
macOS Tahoe has declared war on app icons with distinctive shapes. 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | hinkley 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Responding to myself to add: If AWS is bad at this, Atlassian is worse. I cannot scan the tab bar in my browser and find what tab I was in three minutes ago because they are all too uniform. They're more concerned that I know that a tab is an Atlassian Tab than whether I can get my work done. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | sznio 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> One of the things I'm seeing in some of these examples is icons with the same silhouette doing nothing or less than nothing for scannability. I have this issue with Google apps on my phone. Once they decided that all icons should have the same four blurred colors with low contrast, you just can't tell which app you're looking at without the text label below. And I'm not visually impaired. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | layer8 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The trend towards monochrome, unhinted (blurry) icons certainly doesn’t help. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | fainpul 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> You can see that some designers care about accessibility. This type has both a distinct color AND shape so colorblind people can see it […] This is something visual artists usually learn and are good at and it's not primarily for accessibility, it's simply good design. Accessibility improves as a side effect. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||