Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

This is a pet peeve of mine and it feels like some cargo cult within the UI design "field". There's nothing wrong with the floppy icon. It's perfectly fine. Even if someone doesn't get it, the consistency of its use across apps is enough for its meaning to be clear, which is what really matters.

It's a symbol, it could be a 7-pointed star and people would associate it with Save.

Even when you knew what a floppy disk was, why would you push that button? You haven't seen a floppy in years, don't have a floppy drive and don't want to create a floppy disk.

Every operator has:

Identifier: mesh.extrude_region_move

Label: human-readable string, like "Extrude Region"

Description: tooltip text, like "Extrude selected vertices, edges or faces along their normals"

Icon: optional enum from Blender’s built-in icon set, like ICON = 'MESH_EXTRUDE_REGION'

RNA properties: parameters / flags like direction, axis, booleans

Poll function: whether it is available in current context, like only enabled when a mesh is in edit mode

Execution logic: the actual command code

Blender’s designers generally follow these principles:

Operators always have labels. Icons are optional. Most menu items use no icon by default. Only well-established visual operations (cursor, transform tools, viewport shading modes, etc.) get icons.

Unlike macOS Tahoe’s vague "everything gets an icon" ideology, Blender uses icons when they convey meaning, but not when they’re decorative filler.

It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.

Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.

Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.

Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.

Like I open the app drawer on my Android phone and there are like 16 different icons, all different Google apps, all are round and various abstract configurations of the same exact four colors.

Feels like we're falling into the same trap that Gothic handwriting did with the minims. Yeah it looks very pretty but it's almost completely illegible since we've taken away all the things that help set icons apart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)#/media/Fi...

I like icons (and colors, but those are still mostly missing) to quickly find a frequent action. If the menu is always the same you can learn the position, but with dynamic entries it's way more difficult.

The author is criticising 2025 macOS for not following the 2005 HIG. This is not reasonable criticism, the HIG are not set in stone and they have changed many times in the past 20 years.

These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.

A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.

The thoughtful inclusion and exclusion of icons in menu items builds hierarchy. When every item is special, none are. You've lost the ability to differentiate.

Icons everywhere is a hallmark to me of "webby" UI.

Some things are only occasionally what you are looking for, and making them require a full scan of every menu entry is fine.

I think this is a useful pattern, but I'm not convinced that having specific distinct icons for menu items to highlight them as important is useful. Presentation order and/or simply a consistent difference in presentation for the highlighted items makes more sense.

It seems though that a combination of samey-sameness (greyscale, shape, etc...) and the constant bombarding of attention-grabbing imagery (emoji, gif, ads...) has desensitised me from visual cues and I zero in on text instead now.

No silhouettes. If your icon isn't a squircle, it will be shrunk to fit inside a default shape. The penalty box.

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/6/2.html

The loss of icon silhouettes is a big step down in usability. Frankly it's senseless.

macOS isn't fun anymore.

This is something visual artists usually learn and are good at and it's not primarily for accessibility, it's simply good design. Accessibility improves as a side effect.

I have this issue with Google apps on my phone. Once they decided that all icons should have the same four blurred colors with low contrast, you just can't tell which app you're looking at without the text label below. And I'm not visually impaired.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7kXUbwngB4

Somewhere in there, I think he does have a point.

The point is, if every item in a long menu has an icon, then they typically can’t all be very distinguishable and recognizable, and blur together visually. It creates more visual noise, and less structure, than if only some items had an icon.

As for finding groups quickly, for example it doesn’t make sense give all of “Save”, “Save as…”, “Save all” an icon, but giving the first one an icon helps to recognize the “Save” group of operations.

The author doesn't ask for _no_ icons at all. So I really don't get this critique.

Intentionally omitting some icons is a really powerful tool to draw attention to the actions that the user wants to do most of the time. It just doesn't look that cool in figma (or even for people who are triggered by that not every entry has an icon). But it certainly can drastically enhance the speed of the user.

> Use text, not icons, for menu titles. Only menu bar extras use icons to represent menus. See Menu Bar Extras. It’s also not acceptable to use a mixture of text and icons in menu titles.

> Avoid using custom symbols in menus. People are familiar with the standard symbols. Using nonstandard symbols introduces visual clutter and could confuse the user.

The notable thing here is how recent of a shift this is, and how longstanding the prior rule was. Navigating internet archive is slow/tedious, but I think the rule/guideline was explicitly called out in the guidelines up until a year or two ago. So it was probably the guideline for ~20 years on macOS and has just now been changed.

We did extensive experimentation, and later user studies to find out that there are roughly three classes of people:

1) Those that use interface items with text 2) Those that use interface items with icons 3) Those that use interface items with both text and icons.

I forget details on the user research, but the mental model I walked away with this that these items increase "legibility" for people, and by leaving either off, you make that element harder to use.

If you want an interface that is truly usable, you should strive to use both wherever possible, and ideally when not, try to save in ways that reduce the mental load less (e.g. grouping interface by theme, and cutting elements from only some of the elements in that theme, to so that some of the extra "legibility" carries over from other elements in the group)

Without icons, you have to read many or most of the words.

Without text labels, icons are difficult or even impossible to interpret.

But with both icons and text, you have quick visual search and filtering that involves the whole brain.

The habit has adapted and evolved very strongly with the amount of exercise it gets from UIs, textbooks, signage, and basically every other visual medium possible these days. It has actually become a problem with how often I overlook important information due to it being situated in a "nothing useful will ever be here" zone. But it's difficult to consciously control that instinct when it's correct 99.999% of the time.

Some of the Apple ones really are ridiculous, like the ones around window management and copy/pasting. Even blown up to fullscreen size, you wouldn't have a chance of guessing what they do. But at display size, they are just plain illegible. Having them there is just a visual distraction.

It's not really visual "clutter", the shadows / pseudo-3d elements help the brain distinguish between different types of elements, providing contextual information.

rant:

But in the end, user interfaces are mostly “dead” anyway. No more structure, no more colors, no more icons. Everything is a flat sea of labels and boxes (or sometimes even just lines) floating(!) around. And no two user interfaces use the same style, even from the same vendor.

/rant

I honestly really like that this has a tell-tale and hope we maintain this convention.

If the author didn't care about their project enough to write the README themselves, I don't usually spend the energy to consider the project at that point.