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> Have you ever noticed that the save icon is a floppy disk, even though they became obsolete twenty years ago?

That's called a "skeuomorph" - when something new takes on the appearance of what it replaced.

No, that's called iconography. The reason why icons are called icons. Skeumorph means something entirely different and only tangentially related.

In the spirit of that twitter thread, though, which I feel must be stolen from someone else because it looks new and I've definitely seen it before, it's fun and exciting to ask yourself the following question though: "If I had to pictorially represent the act of saving the contents of the current document, and upon pain of death I weren't allowed depicting the floppy, how the fuck else would I do it?"



> how the fuck else would I do it?

Well, the cheap answer is. . . A hard drive.

But maybe better would be a cube with a circular dial on it. Everyone would get File / safe.


I’d have done a filing cabinet with the document and an arrow depicting its path in to it. Tricky but not impossible at ‘tiny’ scale.

Same concept as the floppy drive though - showing a different thing that already existed.


Has anyone who's not a techie seen a hard drive?

The classic rectangular block does not even exist anymore in places such as phones, tables, and MacBooks.




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