The new app icons are horrific and poorly designed

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

I think my biggest grip about the icons is that, because they all take the square with rounded-corner design, they don't stand out from each other as much, which personally I find slows my work down.

I'm used the to the Finder icon having relatively straight sides, and other apps taking on the form of the graphic. I want my Stickies to actually look like sticky notes, because that is a big contrast from, say, Reminders, which it sits next to in my Dock.

Honestly, the change just feels so backwards thinking.

 

[redheeler]

Jony Ive? That name rings a bell.

Apple:

 

[ArPe]

These reactions are the same every five years and always funny. Your brain adjusts to changes within months and then the fuss boils over. Some people adjust within days.
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Hey look its 2013 and iOS 7 again 😂 Remember the angst over the new safari icon?

Remember when iTunes icon changed color every year and people had a meltdown over it

 

[Takohashi]

Jony Ive was in industrial design, not icon design.

 

[timidpimpin]

Jony Ive was in industrial design, not icon design.

I'm sorry to find out that you have no sense of humor.

 

[Tozovac]

Jony Ive was in industrial design, not icon design.

Except it was under his watch and leadershi* when Apple software headed towards the more flat, more vague, more fashionable, and to many, less intuitive, opening the door wide to letting icons and the OS itself bounce around to fashion whims instead of being rooted in a solid functional basis first and foremost.

http://cheerfulsw.com/2015/destroying-apples-legacy/

 

[Balkon]

What I don‘t get... on one side they want to make the macOS GUI look more and more like the iOS / iPadOS GUI but then again they now have a lot of icons that are the exact opposite of what iOS / iPadOS icons look like. I just don‘t get their point because the new icons and the rest of the new macOS GUI just rarely fit together well.

 

[clemensg]

Very bad design choices indeed, let's hope these are just beta icons / placeholders. I don't think their taste is that bad at Apple, still odd to release something like this, even in a Beta.
I'm pretty sure the designer would be sacked if Steve was still alive and saw that abomination of a battery icon..

 

[xXRainKingXx]

Why couldn't they just wait until they've actually merged macOS and iPad OS before changing all the icons? 🤔

 

[!!!]

I think my biggest grip about the icons is that, because they all take the square with rounded-corner design, they don't stand out from each other as much, which personally I find slows my work down.

I'm used the to the Finder icon having relatively straight sides, and other apps taking on the form of the graphic. I want my Stickies to actually look like sticky notes, because that is a big contrast from, say, Reminders, which it sits next to in my Dock.

Honestly, the change just feels so backwards thinking.

Apple used to have documentation in their Human Interface Guidelines specifying what each icon should look like. For instance, productivity/creative apps should be angled, and look like they're resting on a table/the dock. While System apps should be square, and be straight-facing.

Now all we have are boxes.

 

[Tozovac]

Apple used to have documentation in their Human Interface Guidelines specifying what each icon should look like. For instance, productivity/creative apps should be angled, and look like they're resting on a table/the dock. While System apps should be square, and be straight-facing.

Now all we have are boxes.

I’d love to know what caused Instagram to cave to Apple’s HIG, resulting in ruining one of the coolest unique icons ever into the uninspired tye-dye front-loading washing machine icon we have today.
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What I don‘t get... on one side they want to make the macOS GUI look more and more like the iOS / iPadOS GUI but then again they now have a lot of icons that are the exact opposite of what iOS / iPadOS icons look like. I just don‘t get their point because the new icons and the rest of the new macOS GUI just rarely fit together well.

That’s what happens when Jony left the door wide open to permit personal fashionable design choices to rise up first and foremost. Designers are no longer embarrassed if there’s a noticeable inconsistency in function.

 

[!!!]

Why couldn't they just wait until they've actually merged macOS and iPad OS before changing all the icons? 🤔

Death by a thousand cuts, presumably. First, the App Store and signing apps, then came SIP and then the system volume. Now it's similar icons. They're slowly forcing the Mac community into their walled garden. Notice how the apps are all suppose to be the same shape? They're telling you to Conform to what Apple says.

 

[Schismz]

Death by a thousand cuts, presumably. First, the App Store and signing apps, then came SIP and then the system volume. Now it's similar icons. They're slowly forcing the Mac community into their walled garden. Notice how the apps are all suppose to be the same shape? They're telling you to Conform to what Apple says.

Shocking! How's that any different from always?

The icons and UI are... just a style (or theme if you prefer). I'm sure people can spend all eternity discussing the pros and cons of Apple's UIs, but it's just something new to kick out the door. From a personal perspective I greatly welcomed the arrival of dark mode and the return of light characters on a dark screen, the way computers are supposed to look (hello again late 70s/80s, sans CRT and radiation burns).

It's really kinda... whatever.

The part that's not so whatever, is whether or not Apple will eventually force everybody into childproof land and turn the whole OS into a variant of iPadOS. Albeit I doubt that's coming in the near-term future.

FWIW: in my own perception, having used Apple hardware since the Apple ][, the most horrifying iteration of their UI were the initial introductions of the "flat" icons, which looked like they were designed by somebody in elementary school who had no taste. But... they're just icons. The real question would be, has the system improved in any appreciable manner. Is Time Machine finally on APFS or still just super-glued together garbage (+ 101 bug fixes), has the core foundation gained stability, or still the same endless dumb problems with everything that has a T2 chip and is prone to kernel panics whenever power-saving features are enabled, etc, etc, and so on.

I'm coming from a place of: using computer to accomplish things. I don't stare at the icons forever, I just acclimate to whatever the style of the moment happens to be. If you really hate the icons, isn't it still possible to change them to whatever makes you happy?

 

[Wiesenlooser]

Jony Ive was in industrial design, not icon design.

Ive was head of design, so he did both hardware and software design

 

[slamuelrock]

Well, everything looks crooked, unaligned and like the graphics designer only started using Photoshop a week ago?
Also, a lot of these changes look like the concepts floating around on the Internet for the last 3 to 5 years. A *lot* like them. Only worse. No real changes other than graphics hacks all over the place. Over all its a very unpolished, in-cohesive feeling mess. Lots of beach balls and well, right now the text field I'm typing this in has no carret. Of course its a beta, yadayada... but it's not a great start.

Everything looks crooked because it's a beta. By the time it's officially released to the public, you should expect the inconsistencies to be ironed out.

 

[LFC2020]

Loving the new look. 😍 Can’t wait for the public beta release. 😊🥰

 

[SuperSonic80]

Finally installed Big Sur (Beta 8).
Really disappointed, majority icons are not just ugly but inconsistent among each other. Cannot believe that Apple has gone so low with their quality requirement.

I know, it is impossible to satisfy everyone, everyone has its own taste, but if only Apple achieved a consistency among icons, I wouldn't be whinging about it and accept it as is.

Feels more like I'll have no reasons soon to buy Apple products, their latest laptops are a big disappointment (hot, overpriced, gimmick touchbar) and some Linux distros look way more professional.

 

[matram]

So what would you consider to be beautiful icons?

 

[SuperSonic80]

So what would you consider to be beautiful icons?

It's not just about beautiful icons, it's about "consistent icons". Unfortunately, current icons are just a big mess of different styles (flat, skeuomorphism, neumorphism).

 

[Schismz]

Apple used to have documentation in their Human Interface Guidelines specifying what each icon should look like. For instance, productivity/creative apps should be angled, and look like they're resting on a table/the dock. While System apps should be square, and be straight-facing.

Now all we have are boxes.

Ya, but, the Apple HIG has always just been a lot of “blah blah blah,” the actual HIG amounted to: whatever Steve Jobs thought looks cool that day. Which is why the Apple interface spent a pretty schizophrenic decade with a mis-matched collection of random themes – chrome, no chrome, dark brushed metal, blue scroll bars, no blue scroll bars, capsule-shaped buttons, no capsule shaped buttons, light background, dark background, the Pro apps which all used yet another interface altogether and were always in grey, the old style Aqua interface padded mental hospital wall backdrops in random apps, etc – which gradually crept towards some sort of cohesion and unity, but as of Snow Leopard, STILL wasn't quite there.

It's not like we had Nirvana. All of this turned into the first "flat" reboot, which honestly, to me, subjectively looked like a 6th grader had been put in charge of icon design.

Life moves on. You can change the icons. At the end of the day the question is- will Big Sur be less of a mess than Catalina, while simultaneously trying to keep backwards compatibility with Intel, while focusing all their future development on ARM. I'm sure it'll all be a very interesting, and probably messy, year or three. COVID and half the US in general going down the drain, probably doesn't simplify Apple's already complex process with 1001 moving parts to all push forward.

FWIW I don't find Big Sur a horrifying mess with terrible icons... It's just, whatever, the next iteration of NeXTStep, I meant to say NeXTSTEP, Yellow Box/Rhapsody, OS X, macOS 11, WhateverTheFlavorOfTheYear happens to be. The real question is- does the core OS work? Is it stable?

 

[Tozovac]

Ya, but, the Apple HIG has always just been a lot of “blah blah blah,” the actual HIG amounted to: whatever Steve Jobs thought looks cool that day. Which is why the Apple interface spent a pretty schizophrenic decade with a mis-matched collection of random themes – chrome, no chrome, dark brushed metal, blue scroll bars, no blue scroll bars, capsule-shaped buttons, no capsule shaped buttons, light background, dark background, the Pro apps which all used yet another interface altogether and were always in grey, the old style Aqua interface padded mental hospital wall backdrops in random apps, etc – which gradually crept towards some sort of cohesion and unity, but as of Snow Leopard, STILL wasn't quite there.

It's not like we had Nirvana. All of this turned into the first "flat" reboot, which honestly, to me, subjectively looked like a 6th grader had been put in charge of icon design.

Life moves on. You can change the icons. At the end of the day the question is- will Big Sur be less of a mess than Catalina, while simultaneously trying to keep backwards compatibility with Intel, while focusing all their future development on ARM. I'm sure it'll all be a very interesting, and probably messy, year or three. COVID and half the US in general going down the drain, probably doesn't simplify Apple's already complex process with 1001 moving parts to all push forward.

FWIW I don't find Big Sur a horrifying mess with terrible icons... It's just, whatever, the next iteration of NeXTStep, I meant to say NeXTSTEP, Yellow Box/Rhapsody, OS X, macOS 11, WhateverTheFlavorOfTheYear happens to be. The real question is- does the core OS work? Is it stable?

Regardless, one hallmark of ”successful” icon/system design is not causing the user to stop and take notice of something in a distracting or efficiency-reducing way. Starting with iOS7 and Yosemite, I suddenly started to get very distracted (which never happened to me before with Apple products) by some of the departures from Apple’s typical ways of doing things. Many of these departures resulted in annoyance at least and reduced efficiency at worst, due all the newly-introduced increased vagueness (buttonless buttons, reduced comprehension detail throughout, and everything looking so white/grey and plain) or increased complexity (such as burying often-used functions behind hamburger, ellipses, or gear icons). Oh the irony that Jony’s new interfaces were designed to blur the lines between controls and content so as to not distract or get in the user’s way”.... Oh the irony.

 

[darngooddesign]

If they were going to copy an early Winterboard theme, they could have at least chosen Realize or Matte Nano.

 

[Stormz]

Icons with harsh gradients, OTT shadows and a complete lack of subtlety.

It's almost like Apple is the new Microsoft.

 

[eoblaed]

Unpopular opinion: I like the new look, including most of the new icons

 

[Skoal]

Almost 300 mobile app pages about ICONS. Lol