It's a massacre. The originals[0] were metaphorical and easy to grasp. These new ones are meaningless, for most of them you can't guess what the app does from the icon. The beautiful 3-axis colorwheel gimbal, gone. The concert access badge, gone. The pressed record award replaced with a disc? Is that the MP3 player app?

And Final Cut Pro looks like Windows 11's garbage free ClipChamp! None of them have the gravitas of the old ones.

It's weird because uniformity and minimalism haven't been "in" in years, outside the Silicon Valley bubble. They're very culturally out of touch.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1qbz6g8/whos_excited...

Oh Thank You for the link. Exactly what I am talking about. You dont have to like or agree with every icons beings used previously, but at least they serve its purpose which is easily recognisable.

I saw the new icon and it nearly made me puke. Had it been coming from Google or Microsoft I would have thought oh not surprised.

I don’t think they look awful, and they’re more interesting and opinionated than most boring icons you see these days.

They're definitely awful compared to the icons they're replacing. Losing so much identity and detail.

Eh not sure I agree. The former icons are definitely unique, but not consistent or cohesive at all, especially when viewed as a group.

I think these new icons will grow on people. There were similar negative reactions back ~15 years ago when Adobe switched to their minimalist icon style.

> There were similar negative reactions back ~15 years ago when Adobe switched to their minimalist icon style.

Adobe icons are terrible and should not be the standard. Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2 were so much more memorable and recognizable than the lazy minimalist slop we have now. Even the first CS or CS2 icons were a thousand times better. The fact that the company behind the most powerful and popular creative software did this is unforgivable.

Some tasteless manager made a PowerPoint about "brand cohesion", got his promotion and ruined it for everybody else.

I think we fundamentally disagree about what the purpose of icons is. The point isn’t just to be something that looks cool in isolation.

Great strawman dude (and even if that was my point, they didn't cool in isolation only, they looked good as part of an entire screen of icons too). The purpose of icon isn't to look cohesive within a brand either.

Look at the new Pixelmator icon: geometric shapes overlayed with Bezier Curve handles at the bottom. What does it look like? Vector design. What does the app do? The exact opposite, raster design, pixel painting. What the previous icon signaled.

The previous Compressor icon: A machine compressing film, because despite the name Compressor is for encoding video files. The new icon? Sure with the context of the label you will understand it's something being squeezed, but what? And without the label?

The previous Final Cut icon was unmistakably a movie slate. The new one almost looks like a radio. Why is the pattern under the body? Why is it only at on the bottom and not the top clapper stick?

How are the new ones superior design? How does it improve on anything? It's forcing everyone to learn new icons that convey are less clear, convey less meaning, look uglier, just to serve the corporate interests of "brand cohesion"?

macOS Tahoe icons are a regression on every single front. I invite you to compare Disk Utility (where is the disk now?), or Migration Assistant (where is the notion of migrating from old to new?). And these are just a few examples.

It has that new slop aesthetics.

Yup, looks like they have been created by some intern with Image Playground.