I think this spectrum shows the issues with that though. Take the last one, the pen pot. You truly have to _learn_ what that means. Pen pots aren't a thing that most people are familiar with (I've never used one, I don't think my parents generation did mostly either), and there's little explanation of what it is.
Move up just one previous, and you've got a good looking illustration still, the pen and paper, but now a) everyone knows what a pen and paper look like, b) it literally says the name of the app, and c) the yellow colour scheme distinguishes it well when scanning many icons. It's clearly more accessible to new users, existing users, young and old users, and in terms of illustration quality, seems pretty subjective as to whether it's better or worse than the last one.
I’m not convinced the pen pot needs any more learning than anything else. Even the ones with the paper - is it a word processor, emailing tool, something about newsletters? Maybe a PDF or markup tool? Or a layout tool for print media? Or just a signature tool?
At some point, the user has to find out, in the same manner they find out about the pen pot.
I think users could easily associate the “pen and poison potion” with word processing for years until someone says “click on the pen and ink” and then they have a lightbulb moment.
I think we went from icons being “visually distinct” to “visually descriptive” to “visually uniform”. Personally I prefer the visually distinct. I’m not convinced we gained some massive leap forward in usability moving away from it; I know I struggle substantially more to find an app or tab that I’m looking for nowadays than when I first got a Mac.
> Pen pots aren't a thing that most people are familiar with
Personally, no. Cognitively? We've been seeing quills and ink in children's stories for centuries. One doesn't have to have used a bubble level to get the analogy in the iOS Level app.
> pen and paper, but now a) everyone knows what a pen and paper look like
A quill and ink are conventionally portrayed in relation to writing. A pen and paper could refer to e.g. sketching.
I'm obviously nitpicking. But I reject the notion that we have to oversimplify to the degree you're suggesting.
> it literally says the name of the app
The OS does this almost everywhere apps exist. Putting the name in the logo is superfluous.
I think that is the flawed conscious reason for these icons getting excessively oversimplified and minimalistic. And why the Save floppies were replaced with inconsistent crap. And some higher-up at Apple's severe untreated OCD is the reason for the excessive uniformity (squircle jail, one saturated dominant color, the geometric "grid system" they keep bragging about at keynotes). Look at old Launchpad screenshots from OS X Lion and you'll see what drove that guy nuts and made him ruin every icon.
I showed this timeline to non-technical people around me and they prefer... the original pen pot.
Having distinct icons is nice. People can learn. It's cool to have cultural relics live on in some way. My kids recognize the floppy disk as save, but they have probably never seen one in real life.
As someone who still misses the skeuomorphic design of things like "Books", the first icon is dramatically more expressive than any of the others.
These days I do a search for an app by learning its colour, and using that to narrow down the options. There's much less visual associativity of "this icon" === "this app". I really oughtn't have to execute a hash-table search just to find the damn app I want.
I don't think skeuomorphism applies to icons. The early pen-and-inkpot icon isn't trying to act/feel like a pen and inkpot. It's not like there is an inkpot in the program's UI and you have to move the cursor to it every once in a while to keep typing. It's just a very unique and recognizable symbol to indicate which program is which.
On the command line it would be "Pages", something fairly meaningful. The equivalent to the latest icon on the command line would be just calling it "P". And then everytime you want to launch it you must select which P program you want among all the others; equivalent to searching the launcher for which "black blob with a couple orange lines on it" you want.
I have a feeling the icons tried way too hard to trend toward "minimal", but minimal is not the same as bland generic blobs like the latest ones are (and not just Apple, generic icons claiming to be minimal are everywhere). The middle one seems to be the best of both: fairly minimal, still unique, still indicates "writing", as opposed to either end which both seem to be more about the pen itself and would be better suited to an icon for the Apple Pencil section of Settings.
All of the pen-only ones are terrible for something called Pages, the middle-to-older page-based ones actually fit the brief.
I think images and representations of no longer used artifacts still live on in our cultural knowledge. They don't necessarily have to be a part of everyday lives. Think of children's stories and fairy tales. I don't see swords and shields in every day life very often but I can recognize them easily. I've never seen a komodo dragon in person but could recognize one if walked down my street.
My issue is not that if icon represents what the application does but they all look alike.
The old school icons, even if they were not good representation of what applications did, were distinguishable from a distant. Once you memorized the icon, you would easily find it, on your machine or someone else’s. Even on very crowded desktop, each icon stood out.
>I think this spectrum shows the issues with that though. Take the last one, the pen pot. You truly have to _learn_ what that means.
Not an issue. You learn it once, and then you instantly recognize Pages every time, due to its distinctiveness from all other app icons (and the same holds for each of the others).
You will be looking to click the Pages app among other apps (in a launcher, Applictions/ folder view, alt-tab app row), etc, for many years. You'll only need to make the discovery/association once.
The new one is just some lines over a background, and you'll have to pick it in a sea of other icons that are similarly 2-3 lines over the same background.
Now all icons look alike, and it takes longer to recognize.