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Jim Nielsen

📝 With the Big Sur-ification of macOS icons, many apps lost an opportunity to explore what their icon could’ve been. Instead they took their logo & plopped it on a white background.

I put together a small collection of visually interesting alternatives.

blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/big-

21 comments
Thomas 🔭🕹️

@jimniels @qlp the state of icons on macOS makes me mad, they used to be so good with so much character and visual differentiation, it’s all the most mid visual soup now

Jim Nielsen

@thomasfuchs @qlp and to top it all off, trying to make it better yourself (customization/skinning) is harder than ever

Linh Pham

@jimniels @thomasfuchs I'm glad that the versions of Handbrake, VLC, Audacity and Kdenlive use icons that aren't blah

Linh Pham

@jimniels @thomasfuchs In contrast, these are the icons for the installed apps on my Fedora 40 laptop.

Dmian

@qlp @jimniels @thomasfuchs Just personal taste, but to me, Handbrake and Audacity are two of the ugliest icons I’ve ever seen. Both apps have, in my opinion, also horrendous UX. A pity , as both are practical apps. If you want a trio, add Gimp to the pack.

Linh Pham

@dmian @jimniels @thomasfuchs I'm not a fan of either app icons or UX either, but my experience with audio editing has been with Audacity (because, for a long time, I couldn't afford something like Audition).

I'm just glad that at least they aren't bland logos with a white, black or solid color squircle as a background. They stand out, which is both good and bad.

Random Geek

@jimniels @qlp I love these!

The Big Sur transition made app identification surprisingly difficult for me, with so many icons becoming "stylistically similar logos identically placed and identically sized on identical white squircles."

Jim Nielsen

@randomgeek @qlp yeah my tab switcher starts to require a lot of cognitive effort

Otto Schmilinsky

@jimniels @webjac Everything went to hell when CandyBar was no longer supported, don't look forward, look back.

ehurtley

@jimniels Love the Excel with the old-school "XL" logo!

Jim Nielsen

@ehurtley ha yeah, there were some interesting variations from different eras — even a version of that mid-2000s era aqua-style suite

Barktic Fox :therian:

@jimniels These are all so much better than the stock ones, good grief.

Josh

@jimniels Great icons are the thing I miss the most about Android.

Solinus

@jimniels I think in a relatively recent iOS beta, some menu in iMessage used to have differently shaped icons... until users complained...

nigel
Wow. I don't follow apple stuff much... but that is the laziest shit I've ever seen.

I do like your alternatives.
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