MacOS Tahoe Menu Icons Are Inconsistent, Confusing, and Illegible ⇥ tonsky.me

You may remember Jim Nielsen’s exploration last month — previously linked — of the various icons in MacOS Tahoe menus, and comparing them to Apple’s long-time recommendations for icon use.

Nikita Prokopov went even further:

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.

This is a gallery of elementary problems. None of this should have shipped if someone with power internally had a critical eye for consistency and detail. If Apple deems it necessary to retain the icons, though I am not sure why it would, it should be treating this post as one giant bug report.

Update: Speaking of illegible, I think Prokopov should reconsider both the automatically-enabled snow animation and the searing yellow background.