These are all beautiful illustrations, but they don't feel iconic to me. Granted, there is a spectrum when it comes to detail, but isn't the purpose of an icon to distill an idea to its visual essence?
Glyphs and symbols are more likely what you're talking about. They are often referred to as icons in the tech field so I get the confusion with nomenclature.
Icons are mostly represented as visually interesting identifying artifacts about your product. That's why we call app icons _icons_.
The "icons" within the interface of that app, things that might tell you a menu is present or that a group of users is online, are symbols. Glyphs often conform to content. A good example of a glyph is an emoji or dingbats.
There's two sides of that. First there's trends, which has been flat-shaded minimalism for a few years now[0], but before that we had a range of photorealistic or cartoonish icon styles.
On the other hand, I do believe that most of these illustrations are way too detailed to properly function as icons. Styles and trends can change, but unless the author is working with a different meaning of the word "icon", they are always intended to be displayed at medium-small to tiny scales, staying instantly recognizable between a row of different icons.
They are beautiful illustrations absolutely, but I'd not use them as icons. I would use illustrations like this maybe for the front cover of a manual or brochure, perhaps a nice wall-painting(/print) at my office's reception, that kind of thing.
Now I haven't watched the videos (who here has?), so it's possible that some of these artists actually made less detailed and smaller versions of their designs, and it's just the largest one that's showing off in the display frame (it's actually not a very informative article on the whole, IMHO :) ).
BTW I've seen the term "skeuomorph" thrown around this thread a few times, but it's not a synonym for "photorealistic". Icons on themselves don't generally have skeuomorphs in normal apps or OS's, however they are more common in videogames. And when they do it usually pertains not to what they're a picture of, but to their function as icons, e.g. a paper tag/label, road/wall/door sign, icon (in religious sense), charm/bead, pill design, etc. In which case I'd argue the skeumorph is still more part of the UI than the icon design itself.
[0] counting "flat design" and "material design" icons as pretty much the same things here, when you compare them to the much more photo-realistic icons we had before.
I think detailed, illustrative icons can be iconic - human eyes are good parsing 3d things with complex shades, and the lighting and color can convey more information than just 2d shapes. I think the purpose of an icon is to be instantly and universally recognizable, as opposed to being a platonic ideal of the thing being conveyed.
It's just that skeuomorphism is out of fashion at the moment so this style look a bit dated.
Same sentiment, without the snark: I was surprised to read that claim, because I have never heard it previously, nor do I see any reason for it to be so. I continually see new software and applications, and they typically have their own icons. Can anyone support or elaborate on the claim?
Assuming that old is on the left and new is on the right:
#1: victim of 'flat design' fad
#2: another victim of 'flat design' - remember when 'shine' was the fashion? we now have 'shine fatigue'
#3: i18n version works for all languages, plus any day that is not Monday the 4th
#4: which is better depends on use case
#5: newer icon has much clearer semantics. old icon looks pretty... but doesn't suggest 'adding' (assuming both icons are meant to mean the same thing)
It seems to me that fashion is more responsible for the changing in icon than an erosion of skill. Certainly for #3, more thought and effort went into the icon on the right. We will soon move on from flat design, and people will claim that the next fashion trend is now the 'best ever'...
Eli is known (especially around Designer News) for being very critical of the flat design trend. See pretty much any of his other recent blog posts for further evidence.
Stripping away the politics, the objective claim is that the specific design skill required to make really tiny visually-distinctive skeuomorphs of objects is being left unexercised and untaught (and therefore might slip away) because graphic designers aren't using really tiny visually-distinctive skeuomorphs for much, instead having shifted right now to using more glyph-like or logotype-like stylizations.
This claim (that the skill is being left unexercised and untaught) is one I would disagree with: these things are getting created, whether or not they're getting created as "icons." Depicting terrain and objects and inventories in a lot of video games require exactly the same skill, for example.
You're correct in interpreting his claim to mean: Declaring that icon design is being lost is sure to stir up some senseless and unproductive controversy and will fit nicely into my series of equally unsubstantiated and sloppy critiques of design/designers/design industry.
Why do you need a citation, if you have two eyes? Just look at iOS or OS X included icons, or Windows 10 icons, or the App Store top 100 apps. Most icons are a flat background and some boring bland logo outline. We are in the dark ages of software-related design.
From what I understand of icon design, the goal is to make something that's instantly recognizable when glanced over. Your mind shouldn't have to interpret colors, light sources, shading, depth, etc. just to recognize a brand/app's icon. The Twitter and Apple icons are instantly recognizable no matter how small they are or how fast you glance over them. Facebook and Google have their icons as just letters with one specific color and typeface, and when you see that color + typeface together anywhere you instantly recognize what brand it is for.
Flat icons may not take as much effort to make (which is debatable... in some cases, they take even more thought to create since you have to think about every little line and curve) but they do get their point across a lot faster and more effective than a fancy, shaded, intricate icon with tiny little details. In my opinion, if you can't easily draw an icon on a piece of paper in a few minutes, it's not a very good icon- it's more of a picture or a drawing.
The human brain doesn't have any problem interpreting non-flat icons, as it doesn't have any problem with real world objects. We didn't have that problem you're saying before the flat design trend. Also icons should be aesthetically pleasing. When I see a iOS 6 homescreen, I see something beautiful. Can't say the same about iOS today.
And I'm going to stop here, because people are going to downvote the hell out of me. Design can be something very divisive.
What does “design can be something very divisive” tell you about “why do you need a citation, if you have two eyes” and the original quote that started this thread?
Corporate logos are a slightly different kettle of fish to icons. Logos need to be designed so that their shapes work anywhere - from a screen to a billboard to a letterhead. Application icons just need to look good on a screen.
> Your mind shouldn't have to interpret colors, light sources, shading, depth
You have the cart before the horse here. Your mind already does that. There are lots of perceptual tricks that designers can use to enhance their work, all due to the way the visual system works. Certainly an icon can be too busy, but sometimes adding those items makes things easier to digest. For example, consider a 'buy' button that's a flat, single colour, versus one that has a gradient that makes it 'pop out' from the screen a little.
> and when you see that color + typeface together anywhere you instantly recognize what brand it is for.
This (blue + simple, light shape) trend was taken to such extreme that nowadays I feel discomfort looking at the screen with FB, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, IFTTT, Dropbox, Skype etc.
In my opinion, flat design was "invented" as a cost saving measure. In fact the design of all other things around us follows a similar pattern - complexity and "vestigial" features are being reduced.
I bet answers to that will differ, and correlate fairly well with age. For some people, it will be a few decades before that: http://www.kare.com/portfolio/03_apple_macicons.html. That was a time when an icon wasn't "a drawing showing one object or coherent group of objects", but "around a hundred pixels showing one object or group of objects".
It can’t be a coincidence that “flat” design became hip right around the time “HTML/CSS/JS for EVERYTHING” trend really started to gain momentum. Web tech is far more inclined toward flat, uncomplicated designs than it is the sort of detailed, nuanced, multi-dimensional designs that used to be popular. It’s trivial to create silky, sophisticated UIs in native software, but that segment of software engineers haven’t been the ones loudly blogging or writing lengthy design diatribes for quite some time now.
Design - maybe. Craft - doubt it. The OP, as I read it, is talking primarily about craft being lost.
Maybe I am cynical, but it's easier to hire couple students filling outlines all day than to have proper artists that can do coloring, shading..
This happened to architecture and interior decoration before. We have a nice railing in my house (Prague, middle class appartment block from 1890s) that would be too expensive to replace today, you would be lucky to find a blacksmith who can do that.
Apparently, it was a normal thing 120 years ago. How come that with all the technology we have today, we can afford intricately crafted designs less and less? My only explanation is economic - people are cheap and so-called "simple" design is good enough. I think we are losing something. Instead having people skilled in craft we have them either unemployed or having some bullshit office jobs (I am no exception btw).
What a clever title. I would even go as far as calling it icon rendering.
A good icon, just like a good logo, causes a small visual play in the back of one's mind. For that to happen, a lot of design time is spent in exploration, sketching perceptual cons, cross-pollenations and optimizations.
I respect Eli, but I'd hate to see this part of icon design survive, while genuine creativity vanes.
It's like watching magic. Granted the effect is enhanced by the accelerated speed of the videos, but, wow. I wonder how long it takes to learn Illustrator/Sketch/etc well enough to be able to create art like this (e.g. watching the tire tread get put on the taxi - what voodoo was that?).
