It’s funny. The only people that regularly, seriously discuss skeuomorphism in software design are software developers. It was a big conversational topic among designers around the time Apple ditched the faux leather padding at the top of the calendar app. Developers started talking about it, I believe, because it’s an unusually concrete topic among typically abstract, nebulous, or artsy design conversations. Since then, there have been a zillion other big topics in the design world, and it’s largely considered a conceptual facet of design that’s just not very important. But developers, decades later, still discuss skeuomorphism in design like it’s one of the great important topics of the field. It’s not.

It would be like if smashing magazine put out an article in 2015 about everybody moving to a “microservices architecture” and then any time any kind of software development came up in a design forum, someone would awkwardly shoehorn the discussion into a framework of microservices vs monolithic applications. (Even better, when a developer would come along and try to give a more nuanced perspective, the designers would see themselves as the authority in the conversation because all the other designers around agreed with them.)

If you really want to dig into the nerdy conceptual side of icon design, triadic semiotics is the far more interesting rabbit hole to fall down.