The Icons of Big Sur ⇥ sixcolors.com

A few of these are better than the icons they replace, a few are worse — what the fuck is going on with that QuickTime icon? — but most are equivalent replacements. Many of the icons I have been ambivalent about since Yosemite I feel similarly about in Big Sur.

One weird thing about these is that Apple is now packaging the icon along with most of an app’s visual resources in the app’s Assets.car file. Back in the days when it was still called “Mac OS X”, you could open up an app’s Resources directory and take a look at all of the .png and .tif pieces that built it, but those days are numbered. If you have even a passing interest in this sort of stuff, I recommend familiarizing yourself with Bartosz Janda’s excellent acextract.

See Also: Nick Keppol’s 2014 article about Yosemite’s redesigned icons.