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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Photorealistic icons [1] are much harder to parse, visually, than very simple ones [2]. In general, graphical UIs have gotten far more visually noisy in the past few decades. This has made computers much harder and more fatiguing to use. So often we seem to have “UX” designers changing things for the sake of change rather than undertaking the legitimately hard effort (UI studies) of trying to determine what will make the interface easier to use.

[1] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cTU5hVb22k0/R6u0lS9EFuI/AAAAAAAAB...

[2] http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Susan_Ka...

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You are showing consumer electronics in the first one, and attempting to argue that this is how icons on the MacOS and iOS looked during skeumorphism.

The whole trend to do away with Skeumorphism led to things like Google’s Chrome browser having an empty white area where you apparently have to know you should tap to type the URL. It is still there on iOS.

Because showing browser chrome as slightly 3D is apparently “too skeumorphic” and distracting — better not to know where the website begins and ends lol

macOS and iOS for one are far more consistent and un-busy than they were from 2000—2014 or so. Apple had poor visual design discipline and deployed multiple styles across their apps and OS, many of them garish and cluttered. Also, you replied to a post yearning for skeuomorphic icons and bemoaning the clean shapes of today, which contradicts your point 2.

Please, have a look on Haiku OS' icons.

They are not photorealistic? But also not necessarily very good icons, to me (not quite representative, at least in some cases), so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make...

https://github.com/darealshinji/haiku-icons/blob/master/png/...

Color and shape (outline, at least) differentiation making it easy to identify icons in one's peripheral vision is a really nice property for icons, and BeOS is pretty good on those fronts. The main sin of the "photoreal" icon set a couple posts up was that it leaned too heavily on two colors (black and silvery-grey), not that it was photoreal.

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