In hundreds of years, 💾 will probably still be some kind of square or rectangle
The good thing about Unicode emojis, is that systems can render different images depending on the font. Right now, it’s already starting to make sense to replace that by the image of either a pendrive or some sort of SD card, with a meaning of “removable device to store relatively small amounts of user data”.
What’s likely to age much worse, are 💽💿📀.
I always get a little bit annoyed with emoji because they had the opportunity to become an interesting pictographic language. But because of various insistences on them representing things rather than concepts we’ve sort of got stuck and the floppy disk have to be floppy disk is an example of that.
What I mean is things that are difficult to convey in language. Like how we’ve had to resort to /s and italics and bold to convey emphasis. All the open box symbol that is used to indicate a space rather than just having a gap.
Not confusion, evolution. If people keep using the floppy disk icon to mean “portable small amount of data”, the definition and icon for the same code point can easily get updated to reflect the generalized meaning and new media.
Arguably, the specification should not be for a “floppy disk” or “minidisk” or “DVD” or specific kind of storage media in the first place, they should’ve been for “portable storage media” and let everyone draw what’s more fit for their demographic.
I don’t think there ever can be a better icon. Some are experimenting with a down-arrow pointing to a flat surface, but the floppy fisk is much better.
Thats downloading clearly. Which could be synonymous with saving of course in some way.
Probably the closest one is an open HDD but still. Good UI should not require explanation and everyone recognises a floppy disk as “Save”.
Same as if I want to send domething and see a paper airplane.
It’s become a symbol that has meaning even if the physical object isn’t used or doesn’t exist any more.
This ⏳ is a symbol that means “time passing” even though the object is rare and obsolete. This ⚽️ is a rare type of soccer ball/football, but it’s the most recognized symbol for the game. This 🚕 isn’t what taxis look like in most places — and many people have never used a taxi; they take Uber.
You know the hourglass was a good lead but then you went overboard.
That football look isn’t all that rare, maybe in the US? Same for Uber, I have never taken one and they are definitely not the only “new taxi”. Again, maybe in the US this is more the case than anywhere else.
I’ve never seen a soccer ball that doesn’t look like that, as someone in the US. What else would a soccer ball look like?
For example in US soccer the balls look like this: https://www.adidas.com/us/mls-balls
You sometimes might see the black and white ball but it’s a retro/novelty thing.
The basic shape of pentagons and hexagons is almost always the same, but the black-white color combo is pretty rare - the balls are usually white with colorful designs and use paited shapes other than the ‘basic’ petagons and hexagons.
For example, take the soccer wikipedia page The image on the side shows a ball with a design that looks like the emoji well enough at a glance, but you’ll see it’s quite different. If you go on the wikipedia list page for FIFA World Cup balls you’ll see that the ‘Tango’ style lasted for 6 competitions while the ‘Telstar’ (the one in the emoji) lasted only 2. After 2000 the designs got really wild and nothing like the Telstar. And that’s just looking at FIFA World Cups, ignoring all other competitions and events, as well as balls you could buy at a store
If you were to go look at the balls in a sports shop with some 5-6 models of soccer balls, sure, you’ll most likely find a ball that matches the Telstar aesthethic more or less closely, but there will be a lot of variation in the designs that are nothing like the Telstar, as opposed to balls for other sports which are much more standardized.
As it should
Preach brother! Preach the truth to these heretics who doesn’t even talk about phone icon in their phones is still from the analog days.
So? We still talk about people being ‘three sheets to the wind’ or hanging on to the bitter end.’
‘toeing the line’, ‘swinging the lead’, ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ etc.
