We reached the point (some time ago) where the save icon being a floppy disk makes absolutely no sense to anyone born after a certain time. We could choose a more modern media format and use an icon of that instead, but we would run into the same problem once that media becomes obsolete.
What is a good icon for the function of saving something that can easily be understood by anyone regardless of language or the march of time?
Edit: I know it’s not really an answerable question and is hard but the question is what would you come up with if tasks to design an icon. Given the constraints of the question, what are your best shots at coming up with something that fills the requirements and why do you thing it would work?
Floppy disk. Fight me.
People have stopped recognizing it as a disk (which is good because that meaning was always pretty confusing in terms of saving vs loading) it is now the save symbol and will continue to be the save symbol centuries after the last floppy disk has crumbled into ash.
Similarly, the folder icon has now been enshrined as load.
Why is the disk save and the folder load? It’s completely fucking arbitrary, both worked just as well for each context. But someone somewhere (probably in the MSFT internationalization and standards team tbh) made that choice once and thus it is that forever.
Yeah there is no reason at this point to change it as we just teach people that the floppy disk means save. I was wondering if we could come up with something that the user, at a glance, would generally identify as saving. What would that glyph look like. In other words, the arbitrary and established icon is what it is but with hindsight and thinking ahead what would be a better icon we could design. One that would convey “save” to the most people the first time they see it.
I think the flopy disk symbol will stay the universal safe button. Maybe nobody will know the floppy disk anymore, just everybody knowing its the safe button
That’s a fair answer. There is nothing saying the floppy disk can’t work. By sticking with a symbol that has no actual bearing on function (from the perspective of the future people) you’ve abstracted the concept of saving away from natural language. However, you still place a computational burden on those future people/aliens/whatever where they need to be taught what that icon means.
It’s a floppy disk. Which is the universal icon for saving, the same way a red light is a universal symbol for “stop”.
You underestimate the power of arbitrary symbols. Welcome to all of human semiotics.
No I get that but I’m asking that given what we know about symbols and how we process information, what would be a better icon that can indicate save without having to be taught? There is clearly no right answer here but is it even possible to create something that would work? Things like rain or clouds we can do because there we can see examples. Is there anything that indicates saving we could come up with?
Probably not. We use a kebab or a hamburger to mean “tap here for a menu” for some reason
But we did. We used a 3 1/2 floppy disk, which only made sense referentially very briefly (after it took over from 5 1/4 floppies, but before all the saving was handled by a hard drive), and then that became the convention.
You’re asking if there’s a referential equivalent you could do now. You could do a little cloud or whatever else, but it wouldn’t be any less “taught”, because the teaching happens, like any other UI iconography, by having a bit of text next to it in a menu or a tooltip and then it becoming an arbitrary icon that just means that thing.
The point of the icon referencing something (star for bookmarks, a down arrow into a little box for download and a puzzle piece for extensions in my Firefox bar right now) is to make it easier to remember later because there is some context that connects the visual to the functionality. It’s not necessarily to make it so that I don’t have to learn what the functionality is in the first place and just intuit from the visual. That just happens because I have decades of knowledge about what the functionality in browser is supposed to be and what the arbitrary convention for certain functionality across other apps ends up being.
Your difficulty here is the qualifier “better”. We can create a different icon. A more modern icon. A cooler icon. But there is not a better icon, not until fewer people understand the floppy means save than those who have no idea what it is. And because it’s self-reinforcing (“the save icon is a floppy disk because floppy means save”), that’s not likely in my estimation.
don’t change the floppy :( once nobody speaks of it, it truly dies
Not quite dead yet. This seismic survey ship I was 9n fairly recently… we had generated the navigational data, and needed to feed it into the ships autopilot. This was done via floppy.
Yes, it was a relatively old ship (late 90’s, I think), but there are plenty older ones around. And even when refurbishing a ship, they often leave the autopilot alone.
Yeah I probably should have qualified that with, “unless you’re a municipal/city/state transportation system or in maritime.”
Or pretty much anywhere in the manufacturing sector.
Plenty of products you use on a daily basis, especially processed foods, are being cranked out on equipment controlled by PLC’s from the 1980’s or earlier.
Don’t worry, your wife still will.
There is no correct icon, the floppy disk is at least popular enough to be used essentially forever
Alternatives would be making an SVG that mocks a HDD, or an open drawer with an arrow pointing in
For long term (1000 years) I think an open drawer is best especially with an arrow. It suggests putting something in, loading can be the inverse
So people used to store stuff in physical space like drawers? You mean if they needed something they had to physically go there and get it out of something else? Man, early humans were crazy.
Untill we move to SSD.
I’ve noticed youngsters where I work sometimes no longer know what “saving a document is”, as they only know google doc style sync.
So I’d go with a send button: send to harddrive. Usually represented with an triangle/arrow.
Send/share buttons are already a fucking mess though
I think that’s more of a UX issue than an issue of iconography, though. Could-synched stuff synchs in the background, so there’s just no interaction involved.
I don’t know how far down that road it’ll go, but I wonder if eventually the concept of “checkpointing” in games becomes more frequent than old document saving and that’s how we think about version control going forward.
We should just start manufacturing NVME drives to look like floppy disks.
I feel like the shape mostly doesn’t matter, as most people will never see or physically interact with an NVME drive. It’s just “the files are inside the computer.”
It won’t solve anything, but we should do it for fun, though.
Just keep using the disk icon.
Just because the original reference is outdated doesn’t mean it’s useless; the symbolism carries over. Changing it to the sake of future-proofing makes no sense because everybody already understands it now, and that knowledge will carry forward into the future. It has become the standard, even if it makes no sense, it even if it never made sense.
Horsepower is still used to refer to engine strength, even though nobody uses horses. Qwerty is still the keyboard default even though it’s not optional, because typewriters had settled on that standard ages ago. The human skull symbol is commonly used as a shorthand to indicate a substance is poisonous, because it has been for a long time. Even the term “dial” when referring to phone calls is still commonly used, even though nobody but your great-grandmother still even owns a rotary phone.
Tldr; If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Probably something like this. Seems self-explanatory to me at least.
I assumed it’s sinister for left turn but then I got confused why L was turning right (is L supposed to be for leave?)
Save and Load (?)
For English speakers I could see this working, but I imagine the letters would have to change per language which would be suboptimal.
GTA2 save point.
“Halleluja, another soul saved”!
Spot on 😁
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lmao, well done!
I like it! No need to know the language or anything. Things collect in basins like rain in bowl-shaped rocks so even without our current level of technology it would still have some indication of saving/gathering.
Thanks. Maybe a bit cryptic. Maybe add a couple dots to indicate stuff is being added and removed?
And is there any way to underline the fact that it’s MY bowl that’s being taken from and added to? Is it necessary? I dunno. Mulling required.
To me it’s a bit too much like download/upload. Though I guess depending on the context that’s sort of like load/save.
Almost none of our symbols make sense and are disconnected from their origin. That’s a good thing. Without detachment of the signs from their reference we can’t have abstract thought and language. The letter D comes from an icon for fish. But it went from indexical reference to icon, to symbol. And then we changed its shape over time to what it is today, and some people started using it for the alveolar plosive. The same has happened for every single symbol we recognize and use, alphabet or not. It’s all arbitrary and it doesn’t matter if we don’t use actual floppy disks anymore.
This is all true but given the charge of creating a new icon that would be the “most recognizable” as save to the most people the first time they see it, what would that look like. The question is impossible to answer with a single thing as it’s too vast and everything becomes meaningless eventually. But given everything we know of languages, the brain, how we perceive things, what would be a better icon we could design?
You can’t design a better icon. That’s not how symbolism works. The most recognizable symbol for save is the one we are using now. As designing something new, by default, it would not be recognized by anyone but the designer since use defines meaning. Until it is used it won’t be recognized by anyone.
Edit: like, think of the play icon and its meaning in media control. It was born as an indicator of the direction a reel to reel tape player was moving. It still holds that meaning for digital streaming today despite the virtual extinction of tape players. Its use defines its meaning, detached from its origin and despite the obsolescence of its reference.
Not necessarily. I can see an icon with some randomly-sized vertical lines and think of rain. Or an icon might have a mountain peak silhouhette that generates a random mountain peak. Symbolism doesn’t work in the sense we can’t just design something but I’d argue we could probably come up with something that is at least indicative of saving to people regardless of language. Obviously the floppy fills that for now but if we could go back and drive the adoption of the icon, what icon could we create that would most indicate saving to people regardless of technology.
(I understand there isn’t a correct answer to this, just wanted to read people’s thoughts on ideas)
A friend was a design teacher and he taught me that design uses existing symbolism and iconography. But you can’t control what people will ultimately use your design for. The babadook for example, was a monster intended to cause fear in a horror movie. However, a clerical error by Netflix and an over imaginative tumblr user, turned it into a queer icon that is now widely recognized on internet culture. Of course you can sort of imbue intent and predict use of design to some extent, but humans have an arbitrary side that makes it hard to say something would be a better icon for an abstract concept.
Thank you, I appreciate this response to my comment. It’s given me a wider perspective on the topic in general. It’s almost like that arbitrary side is what keeps the wobble in humanity’s path which forces us to continue advancing and understanding the world, never becoming complacent.
Are you going for just updating? If so, I’d leave it alone. Culturally it’s ubiquitous and doesn’t require changing.
If you’re thinking more along the lines of a save version of the whole “how do we ensure future people know nuclear waste resides within” then you’re gonna run into the same problems they do, symbols change meaning over time. But if I had to pick something that may be obvious to most people, my vote is a scribe and a pen. Most cultures have writing, most cultures with writing save information by writing it down. There are problems, obviously, but if you gotta pick one, that’s my vote until I hear a better suggestion.
And for what it’s worth, with the nuclear waste sitch, my vote first the atomic priesthood
Anything designed to represent the save action will become obsolete eventually because the nature of saving data changes.
Originally you saved writing by inscribing it on a wax tablet, then paper, then removable disk, then hard disk, then solid state, now the cloud.
I would say the most times less will be pencil on paper as it’s the most basic method of recording.
📝
But that’s already considered to mean an edit action
“I have updated the save icon from a floppy disk to a CD-ROM.”
Uplifting my mood
I’m pressing it.
Interesting concept, attempting to indicate something entering the brain/head/statefulness. I wonder if we could generalize it further so that race of underground mole-people would understand it as well (e.g. not a species-specific head).
