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But likewise, indicating "tape reels" in a recording app is a clear affordance that you can record audio.

This is a slippery slope. There's no hard boundary between skeumorphism and visual affordance, even though you'd like there to be.




Not so slippery. "Tape reels" won't make sense to someone who has never seen a reel to reel. A knobby thing that protrudes, as if you could feel it if you ran your hand over the surface, transcends culture and applies to any normally functioning human being.

The difference between skeumorphism and visual affordance is the difference between "intuitive" and intuitive. One makes a reference to past experience, and is built on natural affordances. The other is not.

That said, I think what you're getting at is it might be impossible to completely eliminate skeumorphism. I agree with that. There's going to be at least a sliver left in almost any interface. That's just one of the byproducts of our having a culture.


No, this is not similar at all.

An image of a tape reel is to recording audio as an icon of a floppy disk is to saving documents — a lazy visual shortcut, requiring a non-trivial semantic context. What is the percentage of humans alive today who have used a tape reel recorder?

The boundary between affordances and skeuomorphs is perfectly clear. Just ask yourself — does the form of the design element in question follow its function?




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