It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me
tonsky.me · 2,860 words · saved by 7 readers
Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons Translations: Chinese 1 Chinese 2 Russian I was reading Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 and found this nice illustration: accompanied by explanation: Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction? Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item: Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad. But why exactly is it bad? Let’s delve into it! Disclaimer: screenshots are a mix from macOS 26.1 and 26.2, taken from stock Apple apps only that come pre-installed with the
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