To the designer Susan Kare, designing icons was about solving ‘the little puzzle of making an image fit a metaphor’. Forty years later, that challenge remains.

Susan Kare, “Sketches for Graphic User Interface Icon” (detail) (1982), ink on graph paper, on view in ‘This Is for Everyone’ at MoMA (gift of the designer, 2015, photo by the author for Hyperallergic ...

When you click on that red and white envelope icon to access your email, you don’t think “this is an envelope, which means mail.” Instead, your brain jumps immediately to “Gmail.” Good icons like ...

Microsoft has updated the icons used in File Explorer to be the new Fluent icons, and while they look great, there is a tradeoff between design and functionality. Microsoft announced last year that ...