When it comes to tech fashions and trends, icons are at the forefront. From skeuomorphism to flat, icons have come a long way since Windows 3.1 and Susan Kare’s celebrated designs for the Apple Macintosh. But some trends persist, and the following icons have long outlived their real-life counterparts.
1
Print
Go on, when was the last time you actually printed something on a sheet of paper? I think I can count the times I have in the past decade on just one hand. Those university days, when I discovered I could print whole books out for free, are a long time ago.
The only time I use the Print function nowadays is when I’m using macOS’s excellent Save as PDF feature, which turns pretty much any app view into a shareable, standalone document in that format.
It feels a bit strange to use a “Print” function for this, but even stranger to be pressing an icon that looks like a device I haven’t seen for decades.
Some apps like Slack have wisely recognized that the demand for printing is low, doing away with the feature altogether. But it persists in Pages, Safari, and even Terminal.
2
Save
I grew up with Save and Save As icons; it was second nature to work directly with the file system, manually saving files. This is so ingrained that I continue to save manually, although I do it efficiently with a quick Cmd + S.
Auto-save is commonplace nowadays, whether you’re writing a Google Doc or playing a video game. Yet the pull to explicitly save may never quite leave me.
When a save option is actually available, it’s almost always presented using an icon that resembles a 3.5″ floppy disk, an artifact that has been more or less dead for over 20 years. Still, everyone seems to know their history on this one, at least enough for the icon to persist.
Even a lot of auto-save features—especially in games—use a floppy disk to show that data is being saved. The beauty of this icon is that it is so recognizable, even if its origin is now obsolete. Even a monochrome, low-res icon of a floppy disk looks familiar, while other icons can be more obscure from a distance. I think, because of this, the floppy disk icon will persist for now, at least until the Save function itself is retired.
3
Hard Disk
And here’s a perfect example of a more abstract icon: the hard disk! The physical hardware may have outlived the floppy disk, but its icon remains troublesome: how do you represent a piece of kit many people have never even seen before?
Until just about the present day, the macOS approach has been to replicate an actual, physical, spinning hard drive. If you’ve seen one before, it’s a pretty good likeness. It’s been that way since 2000, when OSX debuted.
Although the icon persists, it’s been overhauled in macOS Tahoe, for a much more abstract look. It now looks more like a cross between an SSD and an external drive, with much less detail.
So long as the icon is recognizable, this probably isn’t too much of a problem. Representing hard disk storage is a pretty tall order anyway, and consistency is more important than accuracy. Still, I wonder where we go from here. It seems inevitable that a new metaphor for “storage” is required. And, again, the need to even represent a “drive” might go away sooner than this type of icon does.
4
Paste
Cut, Copy, and Paste is possibly the most persistent set of icons in use today. But have you ever considered what a strange collection this is? Cut is represented by a pair of scissors; fair enough, scissors cut things, and we all know what that means. Copy is a much more generic, abstract icon that tries to represent two identical things: pages? And Paste is maybe the most confusing of all, simply a clipboard.
The clipboard as an OS function just about makes sense—most of us are familiar with copying or cutting something, then pasting it somewhere else. It works. But, as a metaphor, it’s a little stretched—why, specifically, a clipboard as opposed to a table or a ream of paper? Is it trying to represent something being pasted onto a clipboard or from it? How many people have even used a clipboard in the real world?
And why use the clipboard icon specifically for paste, but not for the other two functions? Some software tries to add more detail with an icon that adds the clipboard to the copy function too. But it then needs to differentiate them, and things get messy.
Personally, I like the other alternative: a jar a paste and an obvious brush to go with it. This says paste to me much more clearly than a clipboard does, and it fits much better alongside the scissors for cut.
I think, though, if I were redesigning this icon set, I’d go more for action metaphors. I think the copy icon is fine, but I’d change the scissors to look more like a dotted outline with a smaller pair of scissors next to it, i.e. the universal symbol for “cut this out.” I think that would then pair quite nicely with a paste icon that looks like a cut-out piece of paper on top of another, maybe with some paste emerging at the edges.
5
Eject
Back in the days of physical media—CDs, videotapes, game cartridges—things got ejected. You’d press a button, and a big slab of plastic would emerge from a slot, ready to be replaced with another. This gave a tangible response to the act of switching context; nowadays, we just press a couple of buttons to change movie, album, or video game.
You’ll still be familiar with ejecting if you ever use external media or, on MacOS, if you use a DMG file.
This one is so persistent, it still occupies a whole key to itself on many (but not all) Mac keyboards.
Even if you don’t have an optical drive, the Eject key can come in handy on macOS. Press Ctrl+Option+Command+Eject to shut down instantly; I love how this powerful shortcut uses so many keys!
6
The Call Icon
You’d think that the icon used to make a call on your mobile phone would resemble that very phone in some way. Not the kind of handset that died out thirty years ago.
The symbol even persists in WhatsApp’s icon, which is about as far as you can get from speaking to someone via an old handset.
But, then, the handset really is the universal symbol for “call me,” the one we make by holding a thumb up to our ear and a pinky finger to our mouth. Like many of our most persistent icons, there’s no good replacement. A curvy handset is just more individual, more recognizable than our modern, flat equivalent.
These classic icons persist for all manner of reasons. They are familiar, so changing them now would serve little benefit. Even people who have never used a magnifying glass or a screwdriver and spanner understand their meaning in a technological context.
These icons communicate what they do better than a more modern, accurate version might. They add a little personality to interfaces that would be very uniform and less accessible with their alternatives.