Icons – Google Fonts

https://fonts.google.com/icons

by zuhayeer • 5 years ago

335 186 5 years ago

fonts.google.com

1f60c• 5 years ago

And a slick new design!

visarga• 5 years ago

A foundational effort, this will help many.

eurasiantiger5• 5 years ago

The provided usage example is bad for accessibility: the name of the icon, e.g. ”check_circle”, will be announced by screen readers. If there is other contextual information that explains the icon, the icon can be hidden from screen readers using aria-hidden=”true”. However, in cases where the icon appears stand-alone, it needs to contain a human-understandable text that explains its meaning.

Also, never use Google’s CDN for loading fonts or icons — always self-host them. The CDNs are used to track your users.

corty• 5 years ago

And special-purpose-font/script CDNs don't improve load times any more because browser caches are partitioned by domain nowadays. So using a CDN for fonts or scripts just increases your downtime probability and your GDPR headaches.

EveYoung2• 5 years ago

I guess it depends on where you're currently hosting your site and if you're using a CDN already. For smaller/private projects, a potential downtime of Google's CDN and GDPR are probably not too much of a concern.

laurent92• 5 years ago

“Check-circle” is exactly the amount of information that the able reader has. Sight-deficient users are as much used to those weird words as able users are used to unintelligible icons.

eurasiantiger5• 5 years ago

No. A sighted user can perceive the placement of the icon within its context, e.g. a checked circle within a row in a table, and deduce that it represents confirmation of whatever information the column of the table represents in the context of the row. This information is not available to a screen reader user unless the visually hidden text makes it explicitly available to them.

By the way, your comment shows an ableist bias: an analogous assumption would be that a person who cannot walk is content because they are used to a wheelchair.

hunter2_3• 5 years ago

If the image stands alone such that sighted users must parse it, then your logic is correct. But if the image is merely decorative due to adjacent text such that sighted users gloss over the image, aria-hidden affords users of screen readers that exact same efficiency instead of wasting their time.

In other words, eyes can skip over decorations without the developer needing to flag them as such, but audio can't auto-skip.

greggturkington3• 5 years ago

No the reader has "account_balance_wallet" (no dashes). It will read as "account_balance_wallet account balance wallet."

It would be trivially easy to use ARIA attributes to indicate which span is the icon's label. Not something most people consider, but this is Google. At least they have an accessibility icon?

charcircuit7• 5 years ago

However, in cases where the icon appears stand-alone, it needs to contain a human-understandable text that explains its meaning.

Why? It's the screen reader's job to inform users of what's on their screens. It's not my job to give descriptions to things.

The CDNs are used to track your users.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

madeofpalk• 5 years ago

As a web developer, it literally is your only job to make a website that is usable by people.

SquareWheel3• 5 years ago

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

Seems they have request logs and publish the aggregate statistics. There's no indication of tracking otherwise.

Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure. Aggregate usage numbers track how popular font families are, and are published on our analytics page. We use data from Google’s web crawler to detect which websites use Google fonts. This data is published and accessible in the Google Fonts BigQuery database.

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...

eek04_• 5 years ago

Also, never use Google’s CDN for loading fonts or icons — always self-host them. The CDNs are used to track your users.

Any evidence of this claim? Also, given that the Google CDNs allow caching for 24h, it seems extremely ineffective even if it was done.

legitster4• 5 years ago

Yeah, seconding this. The main benefit of using a Google CDN is that there is a huge chance it's already cached on the client device. Which would mean that there is less useful tracking information.

panarky• 5 years ago

The CDNs are used to track your users

Is there evidence of this or is it just your conjecture?

wodenokoto• 5 years ago

So now users need to download several megabytes of font to display check marks and search icons or is there something I’m misunderstanding?

paul_f• 5 years ago

It is a 42KB file for 600 icons.

jug• 5 years ago

And which would additionally, I assume, replace the use of bitmaps.

I'm surprised this question was even raised because vector graphics is the most size efficient way to do simple graphics on the web.

michelb• 5 years ago

I would have expected it to work like the fonts, where you only query the things you need, and not everything. For performance reasons I assume people would still make a custom font/SVG set with only the icons they need.

Hasnep• 5 years ago

From the developer guide:

The icon font weighs in at only 42KB in its smallest woff2 format and 56KB in standard woff format. By comparison, the SVG files compressed with gzip will generally be around 62KB in size, but this can be reduced considerably by compiling only the icons you need into a single SVG file with symbol sprites.

So not that large, but I still prefer SVG icons.

happymellon• 5 years ago

It's nice that they provide a git repo for this font with all the icons in SVG format

x3c• 5 years ago

Great to see Social distancing related icons in the list.

jansan• 5 years ago

Or sad, depending on your point of view.

jfoster4• 5 years ago

Are Google serious? Simultaneously pushing websites to be highly efficient (Core Web Vitals), at the same time as introducing the methods that can make them less efficient.

Also, about these icons, they mention "please don’t try to sell them", immediately followed by "Apache license 2.0". Well, Google, which is it? Do they actually mean to say "you have permission to sell them, but please don't?"

throwaway36992• 5 years ago

You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?

eurasiantiger5• 5 years ago

I don’t care since the icon font approach is technically inferior to SVG icons: it’s monochrome only, whereas SVG supports colors and transparency.

Icon fonts also suffer from a plethora of rendering issues across platforms because fonts are usually rendered with speedy display of long text in mind.

It’s strange Google would invest in a years-old kludge tech.

ilogik• 5 years ago

y...yes? they should use an appropriate license

jfoster4• 5 years ago

They can ask nicely, but I expect it will have very little bearing on how people use these. Determining how things get used is what licenses are for.

joshgoldman2• 5 years ago

I'll try selling them

codepsycho• 5 years ago

AFAIK it hasn't "added support". We've used material icons for a year or two now from Google Fonts. Good to see this getting adoption but it's been available for some time

TonyTrapp3• 5 years ago

Regular reminder that icon fonts are bad for accessibility and are technically troublesome also in other ways: https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/

petters2• 5 years ago

When developing, the fact that icon fonts follow the size and color of the surrounding text is nice, though. E.g. when tweaking the text color of a button.

At least in my limited frontend experience.

DangerousPie3• 5 years ago

SVGs can do the same thing.

nagisa• 5 years ago

To illustrate an issue this article describes, https://i.imgur.com/TzMXgUd.png is what the linked page looks like with a forced/limited font selection on Firefox.

Tagbert• 5 years ago

If you block fonts, this is not a surprise.

Using a fresh in stall of Firefox, the linked page displays the icons correctly.

bagacrap• 5 years ago

I can't see how these would be bad for accessibility. The markup is a<span> with a human readable word like "home" in it.

Kaze4044• 5 years ago

https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/...

TonyTrapp3• 5 years ago

Raw icon names (that you cannot influence) often don't make a good replacement for proper alt text. Quite often they should not be read out at all. Furthermore, people forcing websites to use a font like OpenDyslexic will see these non-descriptive icon names instead of the real icons.

senux• 5 years ago

Just to complement other's responses, accessibility is a spectrum.

We ought to believe someone chooses to use an icon for aesthetics AND usability reasons. If the icon can't be rendered at all, it defeats it's purpose despite it having a "description".

Ultimately, if a well designed, user-friendly system doesn't work the way it's intended to, it is an accessibility issue of some degree. Albeit, some times more trivial than others.

greggturkington3• 5 years ago

The content "trending_up" is almost useless, a voiceover will not interpret the underscore as a space.

There are no ARIA attributes that link any of the text to the buttons.

ChrisArchitect2• 5 years ago

(2016)? How about not using an ancient article to make a claim about a fast changing space like web dev?

TonyTrapp3• 5 years ago

Every single reasons for switching away from icon fonts mentioned in that article is still valid. Icon fonts were already a bad idea in 2016, and they still are a bad idea in 2021.

lpage• 5 years ago

The SVGs used to generate the icon fonts are Apache 2.0 licensed: https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/tree/master/....

Solvitieg• 5 years ago

So is Javascript but that hasn't stopped anybody

forgotmypw172• 5 years ago

not true. many design their sites THOUGHTFULLY and as a result they can be accessed without js. case in point: site i,m writing this comment on. counterpoint: almost anything on google.com domain these days.

wgx3• 5 years ago

I have Google Fonts blocked in uBlock Origin now, and it's really helped pages load quicker and feel more snappy.

I added these lines to uBlock:

  fonts.gstatic.com
  fonts.googleapis.com

Occasionally some icons break on a few sites, but mostly it's plain sailing.

Jach• 5 years ago

Something I still find hilarious is that after a product I worked on started to enforce a content security policy, the #1 blocked source was always for google font resources. Of course users could whitelist the domains, but many didn't and anyway their sites looked fine.

matkoniecz• 5 years ago

Is it supposed to be added to "My filters" tab in settings?

wgx3• 5 years ago

Yep, just add those lines in there and save.

mnadkvlb• 5 years ago

would something like that also work on a pihole ? that would be perfect for the other devices too that dont have possibility to use ublock

thanks

wgx3• 5 years ago

Yes - you can block domains at the network-level with a pihole.

Shadonototro• 5 years ago

the problem aren't the fonts, the problem is the developpers who made the websites with shitty performance

this font is quite small

jfk132• 5 years ago

I see they promote the ligature approach:

    <span class="material-icons">face</span>

where the font is expected to ligate the characters 'f', 'a', 'c', 'e' into a single <face> glyph.

This can be problematic on the web, as it means that if a user doesn't get your webfont for any reason (download failed, browser settings that disable webfonts, accessibility options that override fonts for clarity, etc) the entire word will appear in a fallback font, often totally disrupting the layout. (Can your site adapt nicely to a word, or even an entire phrase -- e.g. "format list bulleted" -- appearing in the toolbar where you expected a single icon?)

tobyhinloopen4• 5 years ago

I just set overflow: hidden and a width of 1em (so it’s a square)

jfk132• 5 years ago

In which case the layout may survive, but I expect the "labels" that appear when the icon font fails will be cropped to their first couple of letters or so: not a great fallback in terms of helping the user understand what they're meant to be.

chrismorgan• 5 years ago

Also, most of the time icons should instead fall back to nothing (and should be hidden from screen readers). The main exception that one will observe in reality is a toolbar of icons only with no labels; it’s well understood in usability circles that that’s a dangerous pattern at best—text labels and icon-and-text labels both almost always simply work better.

I deem the ligature approach bad because it encourages leaving something in the document and accessibility tree that shouldn’t be there, and most commonly in a non-semantic way (e.g. a send button might end up showing something like “paper airplane”, which is terrible, or with this specific font, “Learn more →” might become “Learn more arrow_right_alt”), or with semantics that you’ll definitely break at some point (e.g. report_problem is , but if you use that for an alert icon it’ll mislead anyone that ends up reading report_problem; in short, any new semantics you desire for an icon, you need to create a new ligature for it if the user can possibly ever be exposed to it).

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

If they don't load the icons (whether they are image icons or font icons or svg icons), the presentation is badly busted in any case.

echelon• 5 years ago

Neat.

I've got a wild idea.

What if instead of trying to destroy the web [1], Google tried to become the very best company for web developers? You know, take a play from Microsoft's "Developers Developers Developers" playbook after it was handed off to Nadella. The hip Microsoft that built VSCode, bought Github, and has the #2 cloud.

Maybe a first class web has "native apps" that work on desktop and Android and don't require an App Store. That might handicap their rival Apple, because writing for web once targets two of the biggest three platforms.

Get "distribution/promotion" through Search. Their ecosystem works, ties together, and makes sense.

If Web wins and Google is #1 at it, then nearly all of their foes lose power. They can sell tools, build a flywheel, moat, all in one. And they wouldn't even have to be assholes anymore. All the cool kids stop hating.

I don't expect their leadership to come up with this grand idea, however. We're just going to get more of the same. More wood behind all the arrows, none of which hit the target and all of which get cancelled in two to five years.

[1] (Chrome, AMP, killing adblock, knee-capping HTML5, ruining semantic standards, making search a hard problem)

v7p1Qbt1im• 5 years ago

They do push for that though. Via PWA/WebAssembly.

amelius• 5 years ago

So WingDings but by Google. GoogDings?

Did anyone convert them to SVG yet?

momothereal2• 5 years ago

When you click on an icon you can choose to download it as SVG or PNG.

momothereal2• 5 years ago

Not a fan of how the entire page is squished when clicking on an icon. All the icons get displaced and it's a pain to find where you were in the list...

SquareWheel3• 5 years ago

The real benefit here is that you can export these as SVG. Please do this instead. Icon fonts are convenient, but they're really bad for web performance. It needs to download the entire font even if there's only a handful of icons on a page.

SVGs have excellent browser support, and decent CMS support. You can enable them in Wordpress for example with a little tinkering. If you want to make your site faster (and I hope you do), then definitely consider SVGs.

EveYoung2• 5 years ago

Or get the SVGs from Github directly: https://github.com/google/material-design-icons

ficklepickle• 5 years ago

Keep in mind the quantity of DOM nodes being rendered, especially on mobile.

For example, this[0] page loads too slowly on low-end mobile, even though each individual SVG is aggressively optimized to be a tiny file size.

I need to replace them with PNG/WebP. The file sizes would increase, but overall performance would be better (I have tested this).

Now these are illustrations, which are more complex than icons.

0 - https://justtrivia.fun/categories

SquareWheel3• 5 years ago

Good point about DOM size. I wonder if using external SVGs would have had the same effect? I don't know enough about browser rendering to know if that matters.

pests• 5 years ago

Semi related but there was a HN post a few weeks back about a tool that would scan your site and then modify the font file to only include the characters or icons you actually used. I still think SVGs are a better option.

rafaelturk• 5 years ago

Seriusly if you care just a little for your users Dont use this!

Use SVGs.

a1o• 5 years ago

Whenever Google makes something too easy to use for development I get a feeling they are moving on from it - in this case Material.

_nalply• 5 years ago

Because it's not a distinguishing factor anymore, so let's give it to the masses.

joshgoldman2• 5 years ago

And moving towards what?

mortenjorck• 5 years ago

This will probably end up left unfinished like Google Fonts’ variable font support.

I don’t understand how they commission high-quality fonts from professional foundries, then turn around and neuter them in the Google Fonts UI – take a look at the family called Commissioner: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Commissioner

Can you tell from this page that the font contains italics? Or that it has a semi-serif flared-terminal variant? These are additional axes that simply aren’t supported, so there’s no way to know they exist unless you visit the foundry’s GitHub page.

rememberlenny• 5 years ago

They are actively working on this.

I worked on Google Fonts, and you’d be incredibly surprised how few people run the entire service. If I recall correctly, ether ratio is something like one Google Fonts team member is responsible for the equivalent opt hundreds of millions of requests a day.

The main focus they had in the variable fonts roll out was making the internet faster. The process of choosing when to/not serve variable fonts behind the scenes was oriented around the font-weight axis, so they could reduce the number of requests, and hence speed up everything from Google searches to YouTube and every other website using Google Fonts.

Sadly the UX around displaying axes isn’t straight forward. Since the Google Fonts wants to setup a conservative interface, that doesn’t result in users requesting an entire variable axes with every request, especially when it’s not being used - there needed to be more work than just showing the font’s design space on a specimen page.

There is an incredible amount of behind the scenes effort from an incredibly talented team.

Huge props to each of them.

jokoon• 5 years ago

How do I download the png?

The PNG are all in several subfolders...

emarthinsen2• 5 years ago

Interesting that they have icons for "nordic walking" and "electric rickshaw", but nothing for twitter or a tweet.

Macha• 5 years ago

Seems pretty clear they're avoiding icons that specifically reference 3rd party brands.

What would a generic icon for a tweet be that differs from a "message" icon?

emarthinsen2• 5 years ago

Maybe. They have a Facebook one and a few for some other social platforms. I'm not sure why there isn't one for Twitter and GitHub. I'm not saying there is any strategy going on, it's just interesting to see what is and isn't included in icon sets.

ChrisArchitect2• 5 years ago

Announcement blog post:

https://material.io/blog/google-fonts-material-icons

viktorcode• 5 years ago

This looks like it was created for Android app developers. Having a single set of most used icons across different apps improves consistency, which will be welcomed by the users.

artur_makly• 5 years ago

Seems like someone should launch an open-source pro-WCAG icon set ;-)

Phillips126• 5 years ago

For ReactJS developers, this is always my go-to: https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons

Tons of SVG icons from popular packs and using ES6 imports, you only bundle the icons you use.

crazygringo4• 5 years ago

Wow. I wonder what this means for the future of Font Awesome.

I know plenty of people are anti-Google, and also prefer SVG's over icon fonts for valid reasons (though you can download these as SVG's as well).

But now that this is easier to embed than Font Awesome, has basically the same number/range of icons as Font Awesome's free tier, doesn't come with the 10K pageviews/mo. restriction that Font Awesome's free tier comes with, and so many sites already use Google Fonts for their display and/or body text...

...I'd be very surprised if this doesn't quickly become the new de-facto standard icon font.

bredren• 5 years ago

Font Awesome’s product has long been destined for commoditization. Which is probably why they have diversified to offering custom icons and other differentiating behavior.

I suspect google won’t be the only one to offer icon sets like this, so in general I agree this will continue to erode FA’s market share.

Fwiw, It has felt like FA’s most recent release fell far behind schedule.

vagab0nd2• 5 years ago

Google Fonts used to have this great feature where I can select a number of fonts and view them all on a single page. It was super useful because I can type in any text and preview the text in these selected fonts.

However, I can't seem to find this feature any more. Right now if I select fonts, they just show up in the sidebar. But I can preview them in any way.

There's gotta be something that I missed?

crazygringo4• 5 years ago

It still totally works that way on Google Fonts homepage, nothing has changed.

The icons page is just a separate page that works differently from the rest of the fonts.

tomasroggero• 5 years ago

After you selected a few, you can review your selection in the Share page.

For example, https://fonts.google.com/share?selection.family=Akaya%20Teli...

vagab0nd2• 5 years ago

Wow, thank you! Why in the hell would they hide such a useful feature?

reaperducer3• 5 years ago

I like that the SVGs are available under the Apache license. Because of that, I may actually get some use out of these.

Does anyone know if Apple's SF Symbols are available under a similar license? I looked at Apple's web site, and it only mentions not using them in trademarks.

hundchenkatze• 5 years ago

I don't think you're allowed to redistribute them. Apple considers them system-provided assets, so you can only use them on systems that provide them.

Availability of individual symbols and features varies based on the version of the system you’re targeting. When you export a symbol introduced in SF Symbols 2 as an SVG template and bundle it with your app, you can use it in apps that target iOS 13, Mac Catalyst 13, tvOS 13, or watchOS 6
All SF Symbols shall be considered to be system-provided images as defined in the Xcode and Apple SDKs license agreements and are subject to the terms and conditions set forth therein.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Link to the sdk terms:

https://developer.apple.com/terms/

systemvoltage7• 5 years ago

I am sorry but I am going to be that guy. Iconography has regressed so much, it's all the same optically to me. Designers keep pushing minimalism and line-graphics to "reduce crud" like its some sort of a religion. We can't distinguish icons well. There is no effort put into making them more unique and recognizable. What a horrible cult.

Check out these glorious past remnants that we've forgotten about, they were so uhhh iconic : http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/

We love to see someone take Fam Fam Fam icons and create SVG versions of them. Iconography takes time and effort and enormous amount of patience, skill. You can't do this in a week in illustrator which is how it seems most icons are designed today. We've become lazy, want free stuff and no one is incentivized to spend 2 years creating amazing icons. The market for paid icons doesn't exist and we've done this to ourselves because we're addicted to free stuff.

Google services icons? All impossible to tell apart now. Apple macOS dock? They use to be different shapes and sizes, now they are all chicklet squares in macOS Big Sur. Apple fired the guy (Forstall) that was the brilliant mind behind Apple's approach to UI way back in 2013. Since then, Apple UI design sucks.

It is all getting worse, day by day, icon by icon. Iconography was a discipline people took seriously before 2010's. Windows 95, 98, XP icons were so amazing. They thought deeply about it. No one gives a shit anymore.

JKCalhoun• 5 years ago

Minimalism has a place — esp. with reduced screen real-estate. An icon I would display in my tool bar or on a button is different than an icon I would display on the desktop.

My beef with Google's icons is the seeming random decision to use rounded miters on some art, sharp miters on others. Very mish-mash.

systemvoltage7• 5 years ago

reduced screen real-estate

Don't get me started on how much space we waste on any UI these days. Apart from HN UI, pretty much every website and desktop app has wastage of space.

I suspect, we stopped using borders - thanks to minimalism, that we need to use copious amounts of negative space to separate them. So, now paddings and margins are liberally applied everywhere.

crazygringo4• 5 years ago

On the one hand, I absolutely agree with you. I tremendously lament the fact that outline, color, and shading have been thrown out so now we're trying to decipher little rounded-box hieroglyphics based on lines being subtly different.

But on the other hand, the problem is that icons took so much work to create before, and also because they had such a recognizable identity/brand they weren't easy to reuse. Now the icons are so generic that they might as well be letters of the alphabet. They kinda are. A right-arrow is just a right-arrow -- it's not a Microsoft Office style right-arrow, or Windows 95 style right-arrow, or Mac Aqua style right-arrow, etc.

These icon fonts make sense for when the icon is meant to be essentially decorative typography -- e.g. a share icon next to the word "share" or an "opens in new tab" link arrow. They work very well for websites.

However, I hate these icon fonts when they're used without a text label besides them -- specifically in toolbars. That's where I wish desperately we could go back to colorful textured icons that were easy to tell apart. Even after years, I still find Gmail's toolbar of monochrome blob icons to be entirely unusable for this reason.

bckygldstn• 5 years ago

FYI there is a setting in gmail that turns the mystery icons into text labels: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2473038?hl=en-GB

systemvoltage7• 5 years ago

Yes, it attaches a particular theme/brand/aesthetic to iconography. I think we should push designers to do the due diligence and not just get something from material.io and dump it in the app. It won't happen because $$$, ship ship ship and MVP culture, agile, etc.

Careful, meticulous, rigorous, disciplined, thoughtful work is old fashioned.

We produce broken, shitty apps because early feedback culture, not finishing things, market validation, the entire startup culture, etc. I see benefits in this but also negatives. Remember when SEGA games were shipped 100% complete and almost bug free? That's unheard of these days. They had no way to know if the game is going to be successful. No early access. They took risks.

dangwu• 5 years ago

You seem to be confusing these Google Font icons with app icons (Google services, macOS dock icons). The former are meant to be simple, resizeable, used by other apps, work in dark/light mode, and able to be part of any design language. Compare them with Apple's SF Symbols.

systemvoltage7• 5 years ago

Not an expert in this. In some fundamental way, icons have a specific function. To convey action, or status, etc in a small compact graphical form. Semiologically, photoshop tools palette icons and app icons are functionally the same. They are both used to perform an action whether that’s to select a tool or launch an app.

Edit: one key thing I forgot about iconography - familiarity. The floppy disk icon is ubiquitously understood for historic reasons.

jwr• 5 years ago

I think most UI and industrial design has regressed a lot in recent years. Two big issues are:

1. Obsession with "minimalism" and "clean design". Taken to the extreme by Jony Ive, where we started fearing what else Apple would take away in new revisions of their hardware and software. Scrollbars disappeared, buttons started blending into the background or becoming invisible, everything was "clean", utterly undiscoverable, and annoying to use. It only looked good in the keynote demo.

2. Fashion. Designers love following other designers and fashion trends run rampant. That's why on our phones we are beginning to get a bunch of icons that all look the same, every one is an abstract geometric pattern using at least 4 saturated colors. And we can't tell them from one another.

I am so hoping for a reversion of both trends. You don't have to design like everybody else!

deckard1• 5 years ago

Google services icons? All impossible to tell apart now.

Google went for maximum idiocy when they tried to use logos to serve two distinct roles: branding and utility. Which is why they look like complete unreadable ass.

They forgot the simple fact that if you want branding, logos must look unique. And if you want utility, icons must be representative. It's a classic case of wanting impossible design. I suspect there were no actual designers involved in the top-level direction at all. I've certainly done worse things for a paycheck.

ridaj• 5 years ago

Seems like they went with branding at the expense of utility. Not sure they were trying to do both.

core-questions• 5 years ago

when they tried to use logos to serve two distinct roles: branding and utility.

But you can do this. MS Office has done so one way or another for decades - the icons in the product family have similar, distinctive design language, but each also clearly conveys which product it is with shape, colour, and a clear letter logo.

legitster4• 5 years ago

I'm going to disagree.

I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones), as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!).

I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meaning into the layout and flow of the application. You actually have to pick out a nice, meaningful spot to put the button, and make sure it makes sense in the context, and make sure users can discover it easily. Compare that to an open source application that just throws a bright green plus sign at the end of a row of icons and expects you to know what it does.

tablespoon2• 5 years ago

I deal with a lot of legacy interfaces with brightly colored icons and they can be just as confusing if not more confusing than minimalist icons. But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones),...

I don't think anyone's disputing that you can do colorful icons poorly, but that's not an argument against them as a concept.

...as well as a familiarity bias (I like the things I grew up using!).

One of the cardinal sins of modern UX is fixing things that aren't broken, often just as you were getting used to the last "fix."

I think the benefit of flat, monochrome designs is that they force you to offload meaning into the layout and flow of the application. You actually have to pick out a nice, meaningful spot to put the button, and make sure it makes sense in the context, and make sure users can discover it easily.

Nothing's stopping a designer from doing that with colorful icons.

I think the real reason for flat, monochrome icons is designers prioritizing the overall visual look/style of an application over its usability. It's almost like a less extreme version of designing a "computer interface" for a movie.

systemvoltage7• 5 years ago

It is interesting. I will need to check sources (Samir Zeki's vision book is amazing), but color detection happens way sooner in the v2/v3 region than symbol interpretation which is a higher level function. This is why stop signs are red, traffic lights are not icons (even if distance wasn't a concern, icon based traffic lights would take too long for human vision system to process). Evolutionarily, certain colors such as red indicate threat, injury, decay or food (blood) and we're hardwired to detect it effortlessly and within 100 ms or so. Before the interpretation (v4/v5/limbic system) happens. Baring color blindness concerns, monochrome iconography is objectively worse in every way except for the reasons I'll discuss below.

If you study mission critical systems, even a fork lift, colors are everywhere. EMO button is red. CNC control panels have lots of colors.

The reason why we use flat symbols (recylcing symbol on a milk jug, hazard labels on chemicals, bathroom symbols and airport signs, and road signs) is a practical consideration about printability and ease of application (single printing ink, stencils ), color fastness in the sun, etc. It's not for the reasons you're alluding to, although some of those concerns are orthogonally valid - layout should be logical and flow should be intuitive. Color icons are far superior, if someone can publish a scientific study, I would bet on it with real money. They might be ugly, not against brand/identity/etc. but I am strictly speaking of their utility.

tshaddox• 5 years ago

I also think that "instant universal recognizability" is only one potential reason to use icons, and a fairly limited one. It's also great to have fairly abstract icons in a particular application that are used consistently within that application, so that people can use them as a mnemonic.

sellyme• 5 years ago

But I think people have a survivorship bias (we remember the good examples over the bad ones)

Exactly! Survivorship bias is great, we get to only pick the examples that we know were good enough to survive! Why on earth would we want to have a truly random sample that gave us a whole bunch of terrible icons we'll ditch within 3 years?

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

Ok, your comment made me open the site instead of just taking a glance at the comments and moving on.

When I got there, the icons were... actually not that bad. They have very diverse outlines (even more than your example), large features (again, more than your examples), and very precise meanings. Why do you say they are hard to tell apart?

The only thing missing is color and gradients, but that is for good reason, as hard-coded colors do interfere with usability and accessibility, and currently we have no way to encode color independent gradients (that's a huge oversight, by the way).

SebastianKra• 5 years ago

What is it with HN being so hostile towards design?

So many smart designers are carefully considering how to make genuinely ideal interfaces.

But fuck them, they're just too lazy to put effort into complex interfaces, they're just following trends. They don't know what there doing. But Winamp-Themes where you can barely even see the buttons - yes, those are great.

Sure, mistakes are made, and overcorrections happen. Everyone was tired of skeuomorphism a while ago (ironically, OP seems to have forgotten that). The response was a vast overcorrection and we're still recovering from that. But if you honestly think that we're off worse now, then I can only shake my head.

(EDIT) But why is this hostility so prevalent in the developer demographic? Apparentlyy everyone else is okay. (unless you want to argue that there is some secret designer cult that imposes their will on everyone). Is it age? Are we just damaged from looking at a terminal too much?

erulabs• 5 years ago

It's sort of the default state of assumption about the world in my opinion. "Everyone is an idiot except me" makes the world incredibly simple - frustrating, but simple. "Other people are incredibly bright and talented" is a scarier thought at a first look, plus it's vastly more complex because then the second question: "Why are there still problems in the world" arises instantly.

Personally I think it's wildly comforting and explanatory to assume other people (typically) know better than I do. Means I can focus on my little corner of the world and I don't need to tear it all down and rebuild it. Design, fashion, modern art; there are loads of domains engineers tend to assume are full of idiots - and yet we don't seem to dominate them like you'd assume we would if they were, indeed, full of idiots.

ashneo76• 5 years ago

I am going to heavily agree. The current set of useless garbage is not different from the next. And any and all creativeness is sirens in copying and being like apple and google.

The flat abstractions are garbage that only a selected few understand. Instead of being a language that is representative of something, literally the meaning of "icon", it is a flat 2d projections of a 3d shape in a 2 color scheme.

A floppy disk became the icon for saving because it represented "write to disk". Now, it would be a square in the name of flat ness and easy to read or some other optimization. This is not to be conflated with survivorship bias.

avipars• 5 years ago

i use font awesome and material design icons daily!

sandreas• 5 years ago

Sounds a bit like MAUI* for dotnet... I'm very skeptical about one framework / project to solve UI problems on all common platforms but it is nice to see, that there is effort to improve the developer experience in more than one language.

* https://github.com/dotnet/maui

stevewillows• 5 years ago

I really wish they'd bring these in for Google Sheets, too. There are times where I want to sex up a sheet but don't want to bring in external images.

tonoto• 5 years ago

All those icons and no icon for +1 ?

avereveard• 5 years ago

this looks like it's very early beta. lots of the outlined icon are filled, and lots of the icon change shape proportions dramatically between the different kind, say, filled and rounded, making it impossible to use the stiles together like you could with font awesome

Icons – Google Fonts

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