If that's the case, how on earth have you ever used an iPhone?
Would be nice to have some uniformity to the dock, yes
Just because they have a uniform background doesn't make the icons themselves lose their distinctive silhouette
The wonderful thing about the Internet is that sometimes you end up debating someone who doesn't know how shapes work. Yes, they literally absolutely do lose their distinctive silhouette because the background is the silhouette.
No, the shape of the icon ON the background is a silhouette. It doesn't matter that it's an individual background or just straight on the dock. I have designed more than a few icons in my time, so I know how shapes work.
You might have a point on a dock with about 4-5 icons, as the shapes inside the roundrect would read somewhat more clearly, but that's simply not how most user have things arranged. The icons will much smaller, more numerous, and the internal silhouette will be less coherent. The brain has to do more active cognitive processing to look inside the icon to distinguish it from its peers.
The fact that you had to boost the contrast within each icon here kind of argues against you. The underlying shape of each one is still a rounded rectangle. Some have good, legible contrast within that, some don't. You made a row of perfect-contast versions of each one to illustrate your point, but they don't all have that much contrast. And yeah, we still have color to differentiate but if we're arguing about variably outlined icons versus "tiles", the tiles all mush into visual sameness a lot more easily than icons whose outlines are different.
You're right, my mistake. The fact that you had to
LOL I just realised that you're trying to use the term in the sense of 18th century portraiture, but even then not all silhouettes were defined by the subject matter bound by a tight rectangular or oval perimeter. Maybe you're thinking of cameo brooches?
Sorry, man. It really sounds like you're mostly just here to stir up **** instead of having any kind of reasonable discussion. I've got better things to do than trade lame little snipes. Good luck to you.
