Moving away from icons

Much critique has been levied at some of the design language of Liquid Glass. The best breakdown, It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons, shows some of the overuse of icons in Apple’s latest OS release. For the latest design of Summimarket, the design actually went in the opposite direction, using very few icons and relying on type scaling and geometric affordance instead of icons alone.

Good icons are hard to find and even harder to design

Most of the products I’ve worked on haven’t had custom icons, instead relying on the popular modern icon library (Bootstrap Icons, Lucide, etc). The result is generic iconography, which is fine for user avatars and common functions that mostly fit a user’s mental model. But the best icons are custom built for their context, so there are limits to how useful generic icons can be.

Text, hierarchy, size, and space

What icon would best represent “camera auctions?” A camera? A gavel? A camera being hit by a gavel? How does all of that work in a 48x48 space? Will users understand what the icon is?

Instead of trying to find or make icons for this, we know what works: “Auctions.” So, I went back to basics.