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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

> Updated icons for better clarity, legibility, and contrast.

I feel like a lot of these are at best _different_. The entire bottom row of icons in their comparison seem FAR FAR less legible, especially the X, Check and i icons

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I long for the crisp pixel-based icons of old. They take more work and experience to design, and nowadays you'd have to create them in multiple sizes to cover different DPI, but they were so much better than today's vector-based icon graphics.

And I wonder why they turned the floppy icon upside down. Maybe to make it consistent with their floppy emoji? ;)

I think it is largely a design issue. HaikuOS has vector icons everywhere that are as crisp as their pixel-based counterparts (in fact many of them are recreations).

HaikuOS' icon format was designed specifically for vector icons and has support for "LODs" to hide/show elements based on the zoom level but i think (though not 100% sure) that other vector formats can do that too.

Visual Studio's UI is written in WPF and there's native support for pixel-pitting vector graphics, exactly for the purpose of icons and other things that, while vector, must be aligned to device pixels. I think I remember seeing that at least the old icons definitely made use of that (you can download the whole icon packs for VS2012–2019 somewhere on the Microsoft site). And I think you should also be able to do LOD; it's possible with SVG with media queries; you should be able to do this with XAML at the very least via injecting size information via a data context.

I have keratoconus and limitations on how well my vision can be corrected. The new icons all look blurry to me while the old ones are clear.

I see what you mean about the check, info, and cross icons (which should be. But overall I have to say it is an improvement. The new icons are much more clearly designed around a dominant color and shape, which, incidentally, is what makes recognizing them a lot easier.

I would have no idea what the new dark mode camera icon was if it wasn't next to the old camera icon. Light mode seems better but not by much.

You're telling me you knew that was a broom and not a showerhead?

Even on the old one, I wouldn't be sure what it was tbh. Thank god for tooltips and mouseover actions in general. It's the one thing a touch based UX misses more than anything, and probably why, even though I can do more on my phone, there's still a lot of things I'll head over to a computer with a keyboard/mouse to do anyway.

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