There are many complaints about "modern" logos being illegible and how it is impossible to guess the purpose of an app from the logo and I do not understand it. There was never a period of time when you could just look at any logo and know what it is. Just to name a few examples here
- Photoshop (used to be an eye, was briefly a feather, now just the word mark PS)
- Foobar2000 (Alien???)
- WinAMP (lightning?)
- Google Chrome (I never figured out what it was supposed to be, just a ball of colors?)
- Microsoft Word (what does W mean?)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (look at the office 2000 version of PowerPoint, it has a pacman in it)
- VLC player (what does a traffic cone have to do with playing video?)
I think if anything has changed now and then, it was not how comprehensible logos became, but how cynical we ended up. We seem to have developed a knee jerk reaction to find anything about "modern tech" to hate on (on a forum owned by the company that funded much of the modern tech nonetheless) and it had colored our perception of how things really were in the past.
Those icons were incredibly visually distinct, despite being meaningless. I still know exactly what they are for instantly, in my peripheral vision, years after using many of them.
Modern icons are not only not comprehensible but not visually distinct (Tahoe making everything the same shape, many apps removing all colour from toolbar icons, various distinct if anachronistic symbolic icons like Save being replaced with slighly different orientations and arrangements of arrows and rounded rectangles...).
This severely impacts the efficiency of user interaction, especially after the first time you use something, at least for me. It's not a knee jerk reaction, it's a reaction to actually feeling it becoming harder to use my computer.
> There was never a period of time when you could just look at any logo and know what it is
None of your examples are for built-in applications. You have to go out of your way to download those programs. You'd know what the traffic cone means because you downloaded the program with the traffic cone. You went out of your way to get it.
Let's go back to that era and look at some other built-in apps, like Pages is (these days).
Notepad: a blue-covered notepad with some lined pages visible.
Wordpad: a fountain pen writing on some lined paper. Eventually the pen disappeared but the paper remained.
Paint: a paint palette, then a bucket of art supplies, then a glass cup with paintbrushes, then back to a palette but with a brush.
Solitaire: a deck of cards.
Outlook Express: an envelope.
MSN Messenger: two people next to each other because they're communicating with each other.
Windows Movie Maker: a film reel/strip.
Internet Explorer: a big 'e' (for Explorer) with a planet-like ring around it, suggesting a planet that you could traverse. (Okay, a bit abstract)
Over the Mac, there was:
SimpleText: a pencil writing on a sheet of paper. Later re-used for TextEdit.
Sherlock: a detective's cap and magnifying glass, indicating searching. The magnifying glass was later re-used for Spotlight.
Disk First Aid: A floppy disk on the back of an ambulance.
Disk Utility: a doctor's stethoscope pressed against a hard disk.
etc.
> it was not how comprehensible logos became, but how cynical we ended up
Because, on macOS, none of the icons became any more comprehensible than before. If anything, they got less comprehensive even when the visual metaphor remained the same because the representation is so poor. That's what made everybody cynical.
- Photoshop (used to be an eye, was briefly a feather, now just the word mark PS)
- Foobar2000 (Alien???)
- WinAMP (lightning?)
- Google Chrome (I never figured out what it was supposed to be, just a ball of colors?)
- Microsoft Word (what does W mean?)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (look at the office 2000 version of PowerPoint, it has a pacman in it)
- VLC player (what does a traffic cone have to do with playing video?)
I think if anything has changed now and then, it was not how comprehensible logos became, but how cynical we ended up. We seem to have developed a knee jerk reaction to find anything about "modern tech" to hate on (on a forum owned by the company that funded much of the modern tech nonetheless) and it had colored our perception of how things really were in the past.