I think I'm in the minority who loved all new macOS icons and this icon trend. Would love to see them on iOS/iPadOS too but they may put a difference on icons between systems as a rule, so I can understand that
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Apple Updates iWork, iMovie, and GarageBand With Refreshed Icons and Designs for macOS Big Sur
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I really don’t mind the icons. I am more concerned about the quality of the apps and how well said apps integrate with my needs.
Oh man, they are ugly! I hate that everything is forced into a squircle now.
Anyone know if I can update and then still open documents made on these newer versions on older versions?
Strange, mine doesn't look like this at all in Big Sur. The background is a simple grey color and the highlights are blue like before. Did you do a clean install?
EDIT: I had to update the Pages app. The highlights are now indeed orange (which I don't think is particularly distracting) but the background remained normal grey (not translucent).
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Agree! It's not even that they are shaped like iOS icons now (which I do not like personally) but some of them are just plain bad. The shadows on Messages and FaceTime are horrible, others like iWork are just super lazy. The worst thing is, most of them look significantly better in their iOS iterations (compare iWork icons, Logic Pro X vs Logic Remote etc.)
Other than that, amazing design!
It's a shame Jony Ive is still alive. If he were dead, he'd be rolling over in his grave at the ugly marriage of the worst parts of minimalism and skeuomorphism, and the best parts of neither. Honestly, either direction would have been better.
It's possible to run a team remotely and get things done right. This is just lack of leadership.
This is caused by the new “Multicolor” option in System Prefs / General. Just pick any fix color instead.
They planned better icons for those apps but then dumbed it down. Probably the icons were too good for Big Sur. Also notice the Launchpad icon.
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As Rosan, Rosannadana (oblique reference to SNL in the early days) used to say "never mind"
These comments are totally hilarious. the snowflakes and haters have been saying how bad Catalina is (not my experience) for so long and now they refuse to upgrade to Big Sur (which is awesome), I guess they are secret Catalina lovers. who knew?
I just updated, the icons look fine, they are icons (so who really cares?).
I personally love Catalina and don't plan on updating to Big Sur anytime soon, its a bummer the new garageband isn't supported on Catalina
I just don't understand why they didn't use the same icons, or slightly different versions, than the iOS icons for these apps. I thought they were aiming to merge the aesthetics of both OSes.
Did Apple fire all the graphic designers?
These icons look like they're from Word 98 clipart. Apart from just being ugly, with their exaggerated shadows and contours, they're too busy! A good icon doesn't need both a pen and a quote mark to signal that you can write!
These icons look like they're from Word 98 clipart. Apart from just being ugly, with their exaggerated shadows and contours, they're too busy! A good icon doesn't need both a pen and a quote mark to signal that you can write!
this isn't even about skeuomorphism, just badly drawn images.
Those with some graphic design sensibility care. You do know that it's possible for people to be bothered about different things, right? Believe it or not the universe isn't built on just your perspective.
It will be more than a little distracting that my standby Catalina system (2012 vintage so it is not possible to upgrade to Big Sur at least officially) will be constantly notifying me about app updates that I will be permanently unable to install.
I would have hoped that the App Store would be intelligent enough to filter out any updates which are not available for the current OS; to my recollection its iOS counterpart has always seemed to behave that way.