The new MacOS menus could be better

This is not an uncommon sentiment – you may have seen this graphic floating around the internet as a dunk on the Apple design team. Their own Human Interface Principles used to warn against overuse of icons next to menu items.

But if they are going to do it, I have a humble suggestion: lighten the icons so that the text is emphasized instead.

When lightened, the visual stating point shifts to the text itself, with the icon being demoted to an ornament instead of content. Which is what they always were – providing very little information compared to just reading the text. Especially when there are multiple densely packed icons that all look the same!.

Which leads me into some grumpy commentary re. Apple’s design failings of late. They have gone too far down the path of “ornament”, which is terrible way to approach something as fundamental as a desktop OS.

Dye had no background in user interface design — he came from a brand and print advertising background. Before joining Apple, he was design director for the fashion brand Kate Spade, and before that worked on branding for the ad agency Ogilvy.

A Bad Dye Job

Print is not a terrible attitude to bring to software (especially websites!), but it needs to be a tool applied in the latter stages of the process, not the starting point for “this is our new look”. Screens have flux, they’re more than paper.

The guidelines could have been “only add icons that have an unambiguous meaning, to items that would benefit from standing out in a list of actions”. Not that you need icons to do this, bold text would work just as well, but we’re being generous here.

But that’s not what they did. The idea is clearly just “ADD PRETTY PICTURES NEXT TO WORDS, THANK YOU!”. A case of graphic designer envy if I’ve ever seen one.

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