The Save Icon
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- feel0
hmm maybe the thing about being obsolete is not important... most of the tools in photoshop icons i've never used or seen in real life, only after learning photoshop i knew they existed... and it became a "fun fact" that those were once real.
so yea, let it become a fun fact for your grand children :)
- jon_d0
- I kind of like that.waterhouse
- too dramaticinteliboy
- symbol of HELP in many appsbenfal99
- those things work better in water.omg
- omg0
- waterhouse0
More importantly, don't you think it's time we find a new name for television "channels?" I mean, we're no longer tapping in to airwaves for motion content. So come everyone, let's brainstorm to find something better...
"Content sites?"
"Digi-feeds?"Personally, I'd really like to make a grassroots push for "Cable codes."
- channels still applies as they are pathways through which something flows, like a rivermonospaced
- unless you're referring to on-demand content, in which case they don't use channels anywaymonospaced
- My sophomoric attempt at taking a few steps back.waterhouse
- Continuity0
If the primary reason for stopping the use of the 3.5 floppy as a symbol for saving something is the fact the hardware is no longer used, I'm not entirely sure it's _that_ strong an argument, at least not now.
Reason I think that is that there is now a whole generation of people who have grown probably not using that storage medium at all, yet it doesn't impair their interpretation of the symbol, nor their ability to use a computer in the slightest.
Ten, twenty years from now? Yeah, maybe it would be time to revisit it, but then again, maybe not. How many of us have ever used a compass regularly in our daily lives? Few, I reckon, but we still all know its association with cartography and finding our way around.
Maybe the floppy has entered collective memory in the same way other old technologies have, and we will continue to identify with it years from now in this way.
- SteveJobs0
this may not be the best approach, but if you take what is literally happening during a save, be it to a database, hard drive, usb, solid state, whatever, it's ultimately just binary data being written to a particular address in 'memory'.
and since this is a particularly complex abstraction, perhaps a symbol portraying writing would make sense. the vertically oriented background rectangle can serve as a document, server, or tablet, and inside are lines indicating progress of the write (save) action, with a writing tool placed below and positioned at the next line.
- stewdio0
Just wait until this thread really gets started—when we start ranting against the entire desktop / file / folder metaphor...
- waterhouse0
^
No, it is not.
- Continuity0
The power icon isn't _that_ esoteric, though, is it? I thought it was generally understood to mean a circuit being broken or closed.
- actual meaning esoteric to the general public. but recogizable symbolically, making it timeless and in my opinion, perfectSteveJobs
- I guess I was probably giving the general public too much credit for assuming what it actually represented.Continuity
- Assuming they knew what it actually represents, I meant.Continuity
- SteveJobs0
i'm not really crazy about arrows pointing to things because they still don't convey anything to someone - especially when there's so many variations of the arrow pointing to a variety of objects and in different directions. arrows and their orientation have a specific message, so this can be confusing.
personally, if i were to come up with a new save icon, i'd create a new symbol that has some esoteric, but valid meaning, and it would be something that people would recognize universally as the meaning for 'saving'. just like the power icon: