5 ms·

Skeuomorphism didn't fail. It feel out of fashion with designers. We should distinguish between skeuomorphic interaction design and skeuomorphic iconography.

Skeuomorphism didn't fail. It feel out of fashion with designers. We should distinguish between skeuomorphic interaction design and skeuomorphic iconography. Attempts at skeuomorphic interaction design did fail badly, I'll give you that. Document readers that expect you to turn the page by pulling at the edge of the page, mimicking a page turn in a physical book, they're terrible. But skeuomorphic iconography works: The more detail you add to an icon, the easier it is to form mental associations with what it does - and that goes even if you don't know the original object that it's based on. Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable.

thaumasiotes 18d ago
> Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable. Obviously you replace it with the three stacked cylinders that symbolize a hard drive. ;D
- yorwba 17d ago
  Are you sure they don't represent drum memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory
  - thaumasiotes 17d ago
    I don't see much reason to think so, given that that's still what hard drives look like. I don't have any evidence for or against.
- drewstiff 17d ago
  A solid state hard drive...?
asddubs 18d ago
I've seen an SD card icon used for a save icon before. I think conveniently the shape is similar enough to a floppy that you find it while scanning for it as well
DrewADesign 17d ago
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.
QuercusMax 16d ago
This is exactly how our letters came about - 'A' originally was written sideways and represented an ox head, but now everybody just knows it as a letter.

thaumasiotes 18d ago

> Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable. Obviously you replace it with the three stacked cylinders that symbolize a hard drive. ;D

yorwba 17d ago
Are you sure they don't represent drum memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory
- thaumasiotes 17d ago
  I don't see much reason to think so, given that that's still what hard drives look like. I don't have any evidence for or against.
drewstiff 17d ago
A solid state hard drive...?

asddubs 18d ago

I've seen an SD card icon used for a save icon before. I think conveniently the shape is similar enough to a floppy that you find it while scanning for it as well

DrewADesign 17d ago

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.

QuercusMax 16d ago

This is exactly how our letters came about - 'A' originally was written sideways and represented an ox head, but now everybody just knows it as a letter.