Dec 10th, 2009
It’s time to update the ‘Save’ icon
by Miles Benson
This is a concept me and some friends at work joke around about semi-regularly. I can’t remember the last time I used a floppy drive. Which is funny because the guy who builds my PC computer’s still puts in floppy drives in my computer…every…time…
I can honestly say, the last time I used one was in 1998, maybe 2000. At some point, younger people will not be able to associate ’saving’ with a floppy disc.
Or will they?
Off the top of your head, what does a red octagon with a white outline represent? What about a red circle with a red line across it from the lower left to the upper right? A button on the corner of a screen window that has an ‘X’ in the middle? Do any of these things actually look like the object or process that they represent? Does it matter?
The simple fact is a good icon is simple, visually distinctive, easy to recognize instantly, and consistent across many interfaces. The floppy disk icon for ’saving’ is all of these things, and it’s also familiar to almost every experienced computer user. Even if children didn’t grow up using floppy discs, they know through iconic representation that this image signifies ’saving’ something.
However, having said that, even though I can justify it’s existence and use, at some point, I think it should change. To what I don’t know. Because it seems as though everyone’s got their own opinion what it should be. Including me. I vote for the life raft icon…
December 10th, 2009 at 1:35 pm:
Does it speak to how powerful the floppy disk icon is, that I can’t even begin to think of something that could represent the concept of recording an electronic copy of a file that is stored on a computer’s hard drive? The lifesaver denotes “save,” but it doesn’t connote the type of saving that’s going on (rescuing, as opposed to recording a file.) I think the closest thing would be like, a guy stuffing dollar bills into a safe, or a safe itself. But that’s still only loosely connected to the concept. Does a picture of a safe, or a lifesaver, do what a floppy disk does better than a floppy disk? At least the disk is tangentially related to storing electronic copies.
I see this going the route of like, Egyptian hierolglyphics. At some point, the little bird symbol probably meant something closely approximating “bird.” But eventually, it became a stand-in in the alphabet for a completely non-literal concept. Same with the disk.
December 12th, 2009 at 12:25 pm:
A lot of people it seems want to see just a picture of a hard-drive. Which I’m not sure can work either since most hard-drives look different. It really is vexing to think that it’s so difficult to come up with an alternative to this icon.
A friend of mine even pointed out that some operating systems still use an hourglass to denote passing time. Which is kind of funny when you think about it. But I suppose figuring out how to represent time is easier than figuring out how to represent recording data to a circuit board. Like you said, how is possible that the floppy disk is so iconic that we can’t think of another way of representing that action?
I like your interpretation in regards to the Egyptian bird representation. I think that’s pretty spot on to relate it to the disk.