Is it just me or do you guys miss these type of skeuomorphic icons?
Is it just me or do you guys miss these type of skeuomorphic icons?
I don't know about all of you, I don't like these new flat icons that everyone is using. What ever happened to the old icons, like on iPhone and Samsung they used to have them years ago. Those were good times. Now it is always these stupid boring cartoonish designed icons. Side note: Somebody please update this icon pack. I am trying to use it on xfce on arch but some of the icons aren't working properly because it hasn't been updated in a while. I'll donate to you right away if you do it. Link to the repo: https://github.com/madmaxms/iconpack-obsidian
Sometimes I think that I miss skeuomorphism, but then I realize it's not the skeuomorphism that I miss, but my childhood and days when the world was much simpler.
Would I like to bring back skeuomorphic UIs? Yes.
I'm too old to be nostalgic for skeuomorphism. But a retina-burning amber monochrome monitor, text mode, with menus and UIs built out of ASCII graphics, or at best, 640 x 480 CPU-driven graphics modes? Now you're talking.
Ha, you and me both buddy, although I like retina burning green :). Let me know what you think of my personal profile site: www.gradyp.com, made it just for the graybeard aesthetic.
Ya I feel you, I remember I had an iPod when I was a kid with the icons I think it was iOS 6. Now when I try to find skeuomorphic icon packs on Linux it is almost impossibile and the ones you do find are abandoned ☹️
It is by no means just you. I really hate how everything has to be so flat and shadow-less nowadays. I'm not at the point of shaking my fist at clouds yet or anything, but I really miss skeuomorphism in general!
Way beyond fist shaking here. My brain simply doesn't process the trendy flat UX. It looks like when my kitchen garbage can tips over. A piece of carrot here, empty milk crate over there, sprinkled with onion peels, and some unidentified goop that I only discover later in the evening, using my bare feet, while getting a cup of water...
What's weird though is that I similarly hate the circle android icons. They all kinda blend together like a bowl of skittles. Make them squircle though... instantly recognizable!
I miss the time when not all icons were a rectangle or a circle.
I am a papirus man
For those who haven’t seen snl’s papyrus skit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
Or papyrus 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PdffUfoF0
A couple of the best sketches SNL has ever done
Personally I don't, I kinda hate old skeuomorphism 😅
Neo skeuomorphism has some neat novelty though.
Edit: this is just my personal aesthetic preference, I don't begrudge anyone their love of skeuomorphism, or nostalgia for it.
I think I’m in the same place. I really like the idea of icons having depth. Modern icons are very versatile, but lack personality. Having some depth gives them some weight, but never really liked the emphasis on curves and gradients. I think a mix of original Material design and just a hint more depth would be the perfect sweet spot.
I'm curious how you feel about the GNOME application icons, they sound like they might be up your alley
Right now I generally have a preference for either weird stylized themed stuff I make myself, or very flat stuff like what android currently does for app icons, but I can certainly see the appeal of other stuff :)
I really like the application icons used in Gnome but I really like the consistent line weights and geometry of material symbolic icons so I'm still using a material icon pack on gnome
Edit: Here's a picture I grabbed of icons done in the adwaita style Gnome uses in case you don't use linux and aren't familiar with them. Its not a full sampling, but you get the idea :)
i don't, not at all, but still think elementaryOS looks beautiful! Like holy hell, even on their websites they manage to make their design look good!
I miss UIs having lines and clear separations between elements. I loath this new flat style that everything has to have now, where you can't tell when one thing stops and another starts.
And you can't tell when something is active/focused or not because every goddamn app and web site wants to use its own "design language". Wish I had a dollar for every time I saw two options, one light-gray and one dark-gray, with no way to know whether dark or light was supposed to mean "active".
I miss old-school Mac OS when consistency was king. But even Mac OS abandoned consistency about 25 years ago. I'd say the introduction of "brushed metal" was the beginning of the end, and IIRC that was late 90s. I am old and grumpy.
I've got these articles saved, about the history of brushed metal on Apple software: https://512pixels.net/2013/03/brushed-metal-intro/ https://512pixels.net/2016/11/the-brushed-metal-diaries-beyond-software/
To be honest I loved it ... though maybe it has to do with the fact that I have a soft spot for 10.4 Tiger, due to personal (?!) reasons. After Tiger they started progressively tearing down the brushed metal components.
This is the first time Ive ever seen those vowels together
If I understood it correctly, in this context it means that the icons normally retain the original logo and color scheme, while incorporating them into a single style.
a skeuomorph (from greek, "tool/container-shape") is something that retains the characteristics of another thing that it is based on, even though those characteristics are no longer useful. think lamps shaped like candles, or the floppy disk save icon, or media player programs with volume knobs.
skeuomorphic UX is a good way to get users comfortable with a system by using designs they are already familiar with, and the original iphone used this to great effect.
This is a good example of skeuomorphic UI:
all to say, I'm not entirely sure these icons are skeuomorphs. they're just glossy.
i actually hate icons with like shading or 3d look. but I don't really use icons anyway, the only icons i see are in my system tray and when i run wofi
I like how tidy it is. But I do prefer to be able to see icon shapes at a glance with my terrible eyesight as it helps identify.
Quick info, the link does not work. You need to put it in the address part aswell (like this
[https://github.com/madmaxms/iconpack-obsidian](https://github.com/madmaxms/iconpack-obsidian)Here is a working one https://github.com/madmaxms/iconpack-obsidianOkay thanks never made a post with a link
Yeah, I do miss that, but idk how much of it is nostalgia and how much is an absolute aesthetic preference. I think the main reason for the change though is Microsoft trying to make Windows work well on mobile devices though, meaning forgoing the aero and more expensive VFX.
Wish some DEs would make their default style more like a win7 era style. Would be nice to have the variety.
No reason they wouldn't work on a small phone, especially back then
I fucking love skeuomorphism !
The thing I'm more nostalgic for was the time when everything had to be a glistening amorphous translucent blob, a bit like the Cingular Wireless logo or the MusicMatch Jukebox logo. And I'm in that era where you can just play MSN messenger sounds and you'll get an OH MY GOD out of me.
Frutiger Aero, I think.
Sort of. What that page describes is in the same building as what I'm thinking about.
I've had the MSN message sound as my SMS Ringer for years now. The looks I get from people are fantastic.
It's nice and easy on the eyes. I conjecture that glossy and matte (as seen here) styles of skeuomorphism gave way to more abstract design since:
- Skeuomorphism is hard to get just right without being excessive and tacky
- Saturated, simple blocks of color pop out more, particularly on the increasingly prevalent mobile UI
- And thus also have better shelf appeal
If it were up to me, the red line would be when buttons and interactive elements are indistinguishable from text. The stock Android settings is probably among the worst offenders in this regard.
What I really miss is light mode that isn't hated for blinding users and dark mode that doesn't plunge the user into the void. Those "toolbars" look lovely, perfect for any lighting condition or time of day. I've yet to understand why, at present, designers insist on pure white everywhere when it comes to light mode. Maybe everyone is using the night light filter so it doesn't matter? At least pure black dark mode makes sense for power efficiency on OLEDs.
Skeuomorphism is hard to get just right without being excessive and tacky
that was always my impression of os x back in the day. it felt tacky as hell. i'm a linux guy, but windows's aero was so much more beautiful
I miss the KDE 3.x crystal theme
No. Old UI is terrible. The newest UI with extremely rounded corners is bad too but I'd much rather use it than old stuff.
How about flat, easy to recognise icons and straight, square windows and app designs?
Brutalism for your DE!
Another thing that's needed is icon labels or alternative text. Apps like LibreOffice suffer from icon-heavy UI which is hard to understand and remember for new users and even for me without any explanations.
My plasma 6 desktop has absolutely stunning icons, and im like you - I like proper icons that look more interesting.
Try plasma 6, I'm sure those icon sets are also much more complete. :)
I tried to do a couple of icon sets that went with that trend for KDE. At one point I was involved with the KDE VDG and was about to set the style of the icons they'd use.
But apparently some suit told them they needed to go completely flat as they needed to plaster Firefox/distros/whatever logos on it, so everything needed to look consistent.
So in the end I got bored about it and stepped away. I'm trying to redo a new square-shaped-skeumorphed icon set but it's so much work - like it'd need to be your daily job to pull it off.
However, if you take a look at it, it's already in this one - some of them are just the base shape with some logo plastered on it (like the whatsapp one, or the one with the butterfly) and voilá, there's your icon.
So icon sets are incredibly hard, and if you want a skeumorphism icon set its hard squared. That's another of the reasons flat icons thrive today.
I still have some screenshots from my old Android G1 that is skeuomorphism galore. It’s nostalgic.
Skeuomorphic, IMHO, is the best thing that happened to the world of software. I don't ever understand why the whole industry shifted to the ugly flat shit design.
I use this icon pack. A very good GTK/Qt/Kvantum/whatever is Simplewaita. It goes together well with the icon pack.
God, no!
Though these do look pretty, they don't look like the buttons in Windows 95/XP and maybe that's a good thing.
I liked the soft gradient XP icons, though maybe that's just the nostalgia talking
I miss being able to use bitmapped fonts back in the Gnome 1.x days.
What icon pack? (Is this post supposed to be a link?)
Edit: Ah. Now there's an image.
Colorful icons were amazing. That's literally why the iMac sold so well. Colorful. Prove me wrong.
My primary icon theme and widget style are 20+ years old and not flat in the least. You can still have that look and feel on a real computer if you want it (but you may have to compromise elsewhere or do some extra work). On phones, all bets are off.
Dunno what your issue with that icon pack is, but I'd bet there's a good chance it can be solved with a few file renames or symlinks if you care enough to bother.
I don't know if you'd call that skeuomorphism, and we have icons that are similar.
I'm not sure what you would call the opposite of 'flat' in terms of these designs, but I think that's what you're referring to.
Yeah, I don't understand flatness either. Neither I understand the dark themes either. My eyes and brain simply can't do the separation easily, I spend more time trying to process an image. Old style icons and UI colors are the best IMHO.
skeumorphism is fucking ugly and it's the main thing that made me dislike the appearance of os x back in the day. it honestly blew my mind people found apple to be the vanguard of graphical design
Actually no, I hated the Vista era UI design. Linux themes were positively garish, add MacOS looked like a candy store. CDE greatly impressed me back then. It looked like it was made by adults for adults. Highly legible, and the pastel colors are being emulated by Solarized.
I'm sure that those UIs were a product of the times. The 90's and noughties were loud and colorful and exciting and everything looked like a comic. Now that we live in more depressing times, we can look to the science of perceptual psychology.
You see, we have an attention budget, we need to process what we see. Visually complex UIs need to be parsed, and that takes mental effort, and that robs us of mental energy to focus on our work. It's not a crippling effect, but it's there.
Look at street signs and corporate logos, they easily lodge in our mind. Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.
Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.
Interfaces can be needlessly complex regardless of being flat or skeuomorphic.
But flat interfaces still require mental effort to parse. Especially when the interface is complex and/or crowded and you're trying to pick out active UI elements amongst decorations like group boxes/panels.
Essentially, flat interfaces are currently popular because of touchscreen devices. Touchscreen devices have limited space and thus need simplistic UI elements that can be prodded by a fat finger on a small screen.
But I don't need a flat touchscreen-friendly interface on my non-touch dual 24" monitors with acres of screen real estate. I need an interface that nicely separates usable UI elements from the rest of the application window. That means 3D hints on a 2D screen, which allows my monkey-brain with five million years of evolved 3D vision the opportunity to run my "click the button" mental command as a background process.
You see, we have an attention budget, we need to process what we see. Visually complex UIs need to be parsed
One of the reasons i like interfaces with clear lines. But that doesn't fit icons, all-same-isch looking rectangles are not easier to parse than "objects". The mind is optimized for 3D, not for abstract icons.
Absolutely not.