I am currently in the process of packing up my belongings to move house - and let's face it, you inevitably will find stuff which you had misplaced about 6 years ago behind a book or in a box deep within your cupboard. One thing I did find was a box of untouched floppy discs and it got me thinking: when was the last time I used a floppy disc? With CD's, DVD's, Memory Sticks and External Hard Drives polluting every computer users repository for file storage, floppy disc's don't even get a look in.
So with the 'fate of floppy discs becoming apparent' what will happen to the Floppy Disc Save icon that we see on every computer application that has saving functionality? Will it be modernized to suit the advancing technologies that we now use to store our files? Or will it be standardized as one of those all-time-favourites that just don't need changing? Well I did a bit of googling on the matter, as you do, and found this interesting discussion: Modernizing the Save Icon?
You will find a few comic jokes thrown in here and there but some very valid points are raised about why should we both touching something which has become such a standard?
"Quick, off the top of your head, what does a red octagon with a white outline represent? How about a button on a GUI that looks like a pair of scissors? 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 it? Do *any* of these things actually look like the object or process that they
represent? Does it matter?
A good icon is simple, visually distinctive, easy to recognize instantly, consistent across many interfaces. The floppy disk icon for save is all of these things, and it's also familiar to almost every experienced computer user. It could be simplified a little (removing some superfluous details, like the label and the little readonly-lock thingydo), but the basic visual is already
quite simple and distinctive. Nobody's going to mistake it for (say) the paste button. Sure, it's an anachronism, but the standard icons for cutting and pasting are scissors and paste, respectively, and nobody's used *that* method of cutting and pasting since word processing came into vogue. So what? The icons are visually distinctive enough (well, the scissors are; they should
probably have used a roll of transparent tape for paste, but it's too late to change that now) and their meaning is well established."
I think the above nailed the point really: an icon is something which is easy to recognize instantly, consistent and requires no thought. Just because the technologies that we use nowadays look different and are structured differently physically doesn't mean functionally they do not have the same purpose - to save your current file
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