…ripped out when the Office Ribbon was introduced in 2007; the now-limited customisation is now considered an improvement because of the IT support problems caused by users messing up their own toolbars.
I mean, yes; but that’s what Group Policy is for! And the removal of the icon editor is just being downright mean to bored school kids.
It then got copied into Visual Studio, where making all of the thousands of things you could do and put into custom toolbars or menus have visually meaningful icons was clearly an impossible task, but it didn’t stop Microsoft trying.
I assume Adobe, with their toolbar-centric application suite, participated in the same UI cycle.
By the time of Office 2007 Microsoft were backing off the completely customizable toolbar model with their new ‘Ribbon’ model, which was icon-heavy, but much more deliberately so.
There are several reasons I made the switch, but the primary reason is that it makes it easier to build a kind of muscle memory for navigating and performing particular actions. In essence, the text is there for new users and the icons are there for experienced users.
I like icons (and colors, but those are still mostly missing) to quickly find a frequent action. If the menu is always the same you can learn the position, but with dynamic entries it's way more difficult.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820457
https://web.archive.org/web/20150406073147/https://jarretthe...
I tend to assume that anyone who objects to “I could care less” has never lived in the New York City area. See the mention of Yiddish in the above link. But for some who object to it, that’s the issue: it’s a shibboleth of a culture they’re not part of.
Like I open the app drawer on my Android phone and there are like 16 different icons, all different Google apps, all are round and various abstract configurations of the same exact four colors.
Feels like we're falling into the same trap that Gothic handwriting did with the minims. Yeah it looks very pretty but it's almost completely illegible since we've taken away all the things that help set icons apart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)#/media/Fi...
The recent Android releases where everything is a squircle really sucks too.
1. Remove all icons from menus.
2. Make mouse-over do nothing - I should be able to move the mouse anywhere on the screen, and nothing should change colour/pop out etc.
I think that to a certain superficial level of analysis, a matched set of icons looks "complete" and indeed impressive. Designers and implementers of the interface can fool themselves through customary use that they're creating a language of ideograms. Their users, who interact with their product only a few hours per week, only perceive visual noise and clutter.
Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.
The author is criticising 2025 macOS for not following the 2005 HIG. This is not reasonable criticism, the HIG are not set in stone and they have changed many times in the past 20 years.
2014:
"Avoid displaying an icon for every menu item. If you include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read."
Newer versions seem to have escaped being properly archived anywhere, so Apple can gaslight us all into believing the HIG has never changed, that we have always been at war with East Asia, that giving a bad icon to every single menu icon has always been good, and that rule was never arbitrarily changed at the whims of a cardboard box designer and his liquid glarse aesthetics.
It works out though because it does give me ammo when people use these guidelines to thoughtlessly defend poor design as if they are axiomatic rules. For 20+ years having lots of icons in a menu was bad...but now...it's good! Why? I dunno! It just is!
In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all.
Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items…
It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.
A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.
Some things are only occasionally what you are looking for, and making them require a full scan of every menu entry is fine.
I think this is a useful pattern, but I'm not convinced that having specific distinct icons for menu items to highlight them as important is useful. Presentation order and/or simply a consistent difference in presentation for the highlighted items makes more sense.
Apparently other people notice the hot girl and the puppy and the fried chicken sandwich first. Meanwhile, I've already read all the fine print.
No idea why I'm like this.
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.
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.
It was always closed source. That hasn’t changed. That should be a hint.
Finally we lost the background and legibility.
Pepe prayge now than Alan is out that things will improve.
We need to get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles for good design.
I can also be helpful for non-English (or non-language of your choice) when you haven't had time to localize or don't have perfect localization. Let's assume the user has Japanese as their second language. It's much easier to find the option you want with icons than without
The point is, if every item in a long menu has an icon, then they typically can’t all be very distinguishable and recognizable, and blur together visually. It creates more visual noise, and less structure, than if only some items had an icon.
As for finding groups quickly, for example it doesn’t make sense give all of “Save”, “Save as…”, “Save all” an icon, but giving the first one an icon helps to recognize the “Save” group of operations.
Here is what I would think is a fairly good use of icons: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/imag... The icons are positioned such that they introduce groups of menu items, and they create a visual structure that one learns to recognize with repeated use.
It’s much easier to recognize the funnel icon to make a filter, than to skim all that text.
The author doesn't ask for _no_ icons at all. So I really don't get this critique.
Intentionally omitting some icons is a really powerful tool to draw attention to the actions that the user wants to do most of the time. I think that pattern went away in some places because it looks more consistent (that doesn't mean that usability is better) and some designers have some kind of OCD. At least that's what I have experienced in that exact case.
What will you gain from removing the icons?
However, i think what may be described here is that apps often deviate from a “universal” standard or reuse something to mean another. This defeats most of the benefits of using icons imo.
Come on, could we get back to hating Cloudflare or something?
> What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines (as pointed out to me by Peter Gassner).
> They have an entire section in their 2005 guidelines titled “Using Symbols in Menus”
2005?? Guidelines evolve.
> Use text, not icons, for menu titles. Only menu bar extras use icons to represent menus. See Menu Bar Extras. It’s also not acceptable to use a mixture of text and icons in menu titles.
> Avoid using custom symbols in menus. People are familiar with the standard symbols. Using nonstandard symbols introduces visual clutter and could confuse the user.
The notable thing here is how recent of a shift this is, and how longstanding the prior rule was. Navigating internet archive is slow/tedious, but I think the rule/guideline was explicitly called out in the guidelines up until a year or two ago. So it was probably the guideline for ~20 years on macOS and has just now been changed.
Also, I disagree with:
> This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space”
Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought:
> Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?
That still happens, because if they mismatch an icon with text, that can result in far worse cognitive load/misunderstanding than if no icon was present at all. This becomes readily apparent in his follow on thought experiment where you show someone a menu with icons+text, but "censor" the text. Icons+text is also superior to [occasionally icons]+text in the same thought experiment. From my perspective, the author just argued against their own preference there.
I'd argue that the thought process behind determining an appropriate icon is even more important and relevant when being consistent and enforcing icon+text everywhere, not diminished. It also has the broadest possible appeal (to the visual/graphically focused, to the literary focused, to those who either may not speak the language, and/or to those who are viewing the menu with a condensed/restrictive viewport that doesn't have room for the full text). Now, if the argument is predicated on "We aren't willing to pay a designer for this" then yeah, they have a point. Except they used Apple as an example so, doubt that was the premise.
(Not the literacy stat but the fact that illiterate people "figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons").
Without icons, you have to read many or most of the words.
Without text labels, icons are difficult or even impossible to interpret.
But with both icons and text, you have quick visual search and filtering that involves the whole brain.
Isn't it obvious? Because compared to "Settings" it is a far less important infrequently used setting.
That's when I realized that, much like advertisements on a web page, my brain had utterly filtered them out.
The habit has adapted and evolved very strongly with the amount of exercise it gets from UIs, textbooks, signage, and basically every other visual medium possible these days. It has actually become a problem with how often I overlook important information due to it being situated in a "nothing useful will ever be here" zone. But it's difficult to consciously control that instinct when it's correct 99.999% of the time.
Icons aren't large enough to then also distinguish between deleting a row or column or table. That's what the label is for.
It's not laziness, it's good design.
Yesterday I booted my 350MHz Power Mac G4 for the first time in 13 years. I booted into Mac OS 9.2.2. I remember the Apple menu having icons for every item. Once again, though, every icon was in color.
It's not really visual "clutter", the shadows / pseudo-3d elements help the brain distinguish between different types of elements, providing contextual information.
I honestly really like that this has a tell-tale and hope we maintain this convention.
If the author didn't care about their project enough to write the README themselves, I don't usually spend the energy to consider the project at that point.
The explanation for why they do it is pretty simple: localization hinting. From country to country, the text will change but the icon pictures won't. So if you find some how-tos or guidance online that has screenshots but wasn't made in your language, you can still follow along by lining up the icons.
There are other reasons too but that's a big one.
Showing a check mark for if something is active can make sense, and other status indicators, but then it should also indicate if the status is currently absent. (On Windows, some menu items can have a check mark, but if there isn't, it does not tell you if it is one that could have a check mark or not. Indicating this could be useful.)
Another thing that the menus do have, and which they should have because it is good to have, is specifying which keys are used to operate those commands. Windows also has one underlined letter so that you can select it when the menu is displayed, which can also be useful (especially since not all commands have keys assigned normally, so using the keys to activate the menus can be used in this case).
My own programs with menus do not use icons (and do not usually use icons outside of menus either).
Challenge accepted. If a user (esp. one whose cognition generally prefers visual media) uses a menu item frequently, they can remember its icon and that makes it easier to find in the future.
(Doesn't apply to me personally though because I'll instead remember the underlined letter and press it next time. My pet peeve in menus is not icons, but missing or clashing hotkeys.)
I wonder how much variance is driven by zoom level (icons may be more distinct when bigger, text is easier to pattern match vs. read when small).
There are `ibtool` and `plutil` CLI commands built-in to macOS these days too, but to get some graphical editor, u would need to download 3GB of Xcode and u would invalidate the code signatures, etc...
Plus there is a huge churn in the application versions, so any customizations would need to be applied repeatedly to newer app versions.
Sad, really...
Deal with it.
arcbyte•5h ago
It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better.
I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?
DonHopkins•3h ago
Every operator has:
Identifier: mesh.extrude_region_move
Label: human-readable string, like "Extrude Region"
Description: tooltip text, like "Extrude selected vertices, edges or faces along their normals"
Icon: optional enum from Blender’s built-in icon set, like ICON = 'MESH_EXTRUDE_REGION'
RNA properties: parameters / flags like direction, axis, booleans
Poll function: whether it is available in current context, like only enabled when a mesh is in edit mode
Execution logic: the actual command code
Blender’s designers generally follow these principles:
Operators always have labels. Icons are optional. Most menu items use no icon by default. Only well-established visual operations (cursor, transform tools, viewport shading modes, etc.) get icons.
Unlike macOS Tahoe’s vague "everything gets an icon" ideology, Blender uses icons when they convey meaning, but not when they’re decorative filler.
yuye•30m ago
It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.
Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.
Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.
Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.