The Latin letter A we use today started out as the Egyptian hieroglyph 𓃾 (a oxen’s head), which got turned into 𐤀, which then turned into the Greek alpha Α. Even though the Egyptians used 𓃾 to form a k-like sound, today A is a vowel, the start of a lettered list, a high grade, and much more. Do we think of cows when we use the letter A? No, of course not; the symbol was picked because phonetically, “ʾalp” started with an A sound when the Egyptians eventually started using their glyphs as phonetic writing rather than assigning meaning to the individual symbols, and that’s where the Phoenicians got it from.
In hundreds of years, 💾 will probably still be some kind of square or rectangle. The floppy disk it once resembled may not even conceptually exist anymore, but the meaning of the symbol has been replaced by “save, keep information”. Perhaps one day it too will join the alphabet as some kind of weird S that nobody knows the origin of.
You might be right. Take a look at the save icon in Blender.
IT’S STARTING
On my OS, the default save icon looks like the download icon:
I guess, in the future, where everything is cloud connected, the save icon may as well be an upload/download icon.
Dey took are floppy disk!
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 💽💿📀.
💾 (U+1F4BE) is defined as “floppy disk”, so I don’t think there will be any confusion. 🖪 (BLACK HARD SHELL FLOPPY DISK) is defined even stricter, though my current font turns the black floppy into a white floppy with dark mode enabled. In theory someone could ignore the Unicode definitions and use whatever media they like, but the media type is very much specified in the character description.
The original Unicode spec suggesting the inclusion of emoji (link) had the letters “DVD” written underneath a DVD, because they’re virtually indistinguishable. Why the CD and DVD needed a separate “optical disk” emoji, I’ll never know. At least Minidisc is visually distinct, even if everyone but the Japanese probably think it represents a disc+case because Minidisc never seemed to get popular anywhere else.
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.
Unicode is intended to represent the things people have written down. Some Japanese companies designed Emoji, which was used by people to communicate, so that’s why they’re in the standard. Every emoji that now gets added gets a description and a reference design to make the meaning clear. We’ve had a company ignore the specification and it wasn’t great (Google’s hairy heart, because nobody read the spec and the artist just copied what they saw in the picture).
Unicode isn’t designed to contain abstract concepts. Thank goodness we never had UI design codified the way Unicode works, or touch screens would have been unusable.
Google’s hairy heart, because nobody read the spec and the artist just copied what they saw in the picture
That isn’t what happened, and rather more of an example of what I was talking about.
“Yellow heart” is a medical condition that makes the heart look “hairy”, “hairy heart” is referenced throughout history as associated with bravery and is still a saying in Portuguese; at the same time, “green heart” was represented as a sort of “sweaty” (envious) heart; “blue heart” was… a weird thing, but at least they made it blue color.
Instead of “[color] heart”, someone designed them as “idiomatic meaning of [color heart]”, interpreting the Unicode descriptions as idiomatic expressions.
This is the same process that could morph a “floppy disk” into a “small capacity portable data storage device” that could get depicted in any number of ways.
Unicode isn’t designed to contain abstract concepts.
I’d argue that all the emotion faces are “abstract concepts” 🌞😎🌝🕶️😇
I’ve have never heard of “yellow heart” as a medical condition and I can’t find any references about it online either, neither in English or Portuguese. Maybe you can link me?
I think the misinterpretation makes the most sense:
Especially considering that none of the other emoji are even trying to do any kind of idiomatic interpretation of their description.
Then again, Android 4 just put random heart related shit in all the heart emoji space so maybe there really was an artist that decided to go off the rails and draw some weird hearts. Either way, they’ve been corrected now. Whatever experiment Google did with their emoji set, it’s now over; there is some room for interpretation, but not so much that it deviates strongly from every other emoji design.
To quote the unicode committee:
While the shape of the character can vary significantly, designers should maintain the same “core” shape, based on the shapes used mostly commonly in industry practice. For example, a U+1F36F HONEY POT encodes for a pictorial representation of a pot of honey, not for some semantic like “sweet”. It would be unexpected to represent U+1F36F HONEY POT as a sugar cube, for example. Deviating too far from that core shape can cause interoperability problems: see accidentally-sending-friends-a-hairy-heart-emoji. Direction (whether a person or object faces to the right or left, up or down) should also be maintained where possible, because a change in direction can change the meaning: when sending 🐊 🔫👮 “crocodile shot by police”, people expect any recipient to see the pistol pointing in the same direction as when they composed it. Similarly, the U+1F6B6 pedestrian should face to the left 🚶, not to the right. See Section 2.10, Emoji Glyph Facing Direction.
Uremic pericarditis, which causes fibrinous pericarditis, presents as a yellow heart with hair-like stuff. The sources are pathology books (check Google Books) and autopsy photos (some are on Google Images, kind of NSFW). It used to be associated with “heroic death”. Then “Coração Peludo” got several meanings, so I can imagine someone familiar with those and looking for references of “yellow heart”, might’ve found examples of “hairy heart” and drawn just that.
I’m guessing they tasked a single person with adding the emojis (how hard is it to draw some simple colored shapes, right?), and didn’t have anyone review them. They probably were also told not to look at examples from competitors, in case they copied them too closely and got sued for copyright infringement.
As for Unicode… it’s a shame person figures can be made of “group type {shape [+ skin tone] [+ gender] [+ hair color]}*n”, but they didn’t use general color modifiers for the basic shapes. 🐈⬛
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.
If you create a pictographic language and get others to use it, Unicode will include your characters. They included Chinese and other pictographic ways of writing, after all.
I don’t think pictographic language is that great. Every picture has cultural associations (just look at the associations with 🍆, 🍑, or 🥺). If you would like to communicate through pictographic symbols representing concepts, there’s a wide range of them that over a billion people use every day, and that is (almost) entirely included in Unicode already.
Chinese is of course not a pictographic language it’s an alphabet like western alphabets.
We kind of have pictograms in Unicode already like ☢️ or ⚠️ or ⚡ which are universal even though they don’t really represent physical objects.
The radiation icon particular doesn’t really make any kind of logical sense, radiation is in non-visual threat so there’s no reason it should look like that, over anything else, and yet everyone knows that’s what the symbol means. It’s not a picture of something, it’s the picture of a concept.
Equally there’s no real reason that warning should be a triangle and electricity definitely doesn’t look like that. Again though we kind of don’t even think about it we just know what the symbols mean. With Chinese you actually have to learn the language like you have to learn english or you have to learn Italian.
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.
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.
An HDD is also a deprecated symbol
Agreed but given the symbol for an SSD would be a rectangle or a rectangle with a plug at the bottom, I think HDD would be the most recent tech that would convey “save” when used as a symbol.
Hard to beat the good ol’ floppy though
💾
Thats downloading clearly. Which could be synonymous with saving of course in some way.
Every time you download, you are saving. But not every time you save, are you downloading.
There is an icon that Adobe has with an arrow pointing down into a folder, and I think that works pretty well.
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.
I guess I was stretching it. In my defense I have never seen the black-and-white ball in play at kids’ or professional matches. And there aren’t yellow taxis in my city. Yes — in the US.
The ⏳ is still the most intuitive way to represent “time passing” with a static image. One could maybe use a ⏱️ with the needle blurred to indicate movement… but the beauty of ⏳ is that it needs nothing more, just like ⌛ clearly indicates “the allotted time has passed”.
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.
The digital age phone icon is just —
/jk
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.
“copy the floppy”
Don’t copy that floppy 🕺🏾
I copied a floppy with a downloaded car on it. Come at me bro.
🚨🚔👮🏾 The heat is on!
I’ve used a Zip disk more recently than I’ve used a manila folder, but we still use those for directory icons (and the Open icon).
The click of death will come for them eventually :p
Optimistic of you, that we will get our shit together and get there. Can’t even mask to save millions…
I think it’ll happen the other way around. Will get out there at least in some amount because the materials out there and we can mine them. There will be plenty of opportunity in space for people to form their own societies. They’ll have to it’ll be too difficult to administer from earth not unless we invent faster than light travel and then you’ll just do the same thing on a larger scale.
The problem earth has is there’s not enough room for everyone to experiment with different societies.
With more room we have more people and with more people we have more innovation eventually someone will invent the replicator or matter synthesis or something and we can stop worrying about resources at which point governments rather cease to have any power.
As it should be. We no longer use floppies so it can exist purely as its own icon and not be confused
It’s the year 2023 and people are still using “X” to represent the number ten.
And “A” to represent the wide open mouth vowel … and …. You get the point.
I wonder what the oldest symbols still in use are? You could probably argue for some of the old language roots for say water that arguably as far back as language itself.
Speaking of water… How often do you actually see a drop of water shaped like a drop? Almost never
Every time it sticks to a vertical surface, like on glass: 💧
This on the other hand, is not how drops fall: ☔
It used to be a piggy bank and peeps from many countries had no idea what that was supposed to be…
2246 is wayyyy to soon to have Mars Terraformed
Eh, depends on if the singularity hurries tf up.
It’s 2023, we haven’t even gone back to the Moon…
That’s download.
Download is supposed to be:
But what about this one:
With most apps auto-saving nowadays, even Win11’s notepad, it seems like a “prevent my work from disappearing” is becoming an obsolete icon.
That’s a bookmark. Specifically, it’s a skeuomorph of the ribbon some books come with sewn into their binding for marking a page.
a skeuomorph of the ribbon some books come with
And yet, it says “save” right there on the button.
Don’t miss the larger point: “save” no longer means what “save to a floppy” used to mean. For a lot of people, “save” means to download, or to bookmark, while apps do the old “keep app data for later” by themselves in the background.
…and it isn’t 2246.
The image is of a website and the context is “save your place”, which is why it’s a bookmark icon: that button creates a bookmark that loads that page back up. The context here never meant “save to a floppy”.
It’s 2023, there is no context anymore for “save to a floppy”. As for the “Save” like in the meme, the contexts we have left nowadays are: “save your place”, “save to your device”, “export”, and little more. In fact the “Share” icon could replace them all, with “Share” on mobile showing, among others, options like “share with the cloud app” or “share with the file explorer app”.
It only recently occurred to me the literal meaning of floppy vs. hard disk and the distinction between soft-, firm- and hardware.
I thought they were called floppy because of those old ones that were you know… Floppy, in difference to the hard disks inside the tower.
They were called floppy disks because, originally, they were literally floppy while the hard drive was, you know… Hard. 5 inch disks were flexible. 3.5 inch disks were not literally floppy, but still were called “floppy disks” given they were the same thing, but smaller and with more rigidity in the casing that held the magnetic film.
Wait until you hear why Bill Gates called the company “Micro-soft”…
Gates didn’t name it AFAIK. From wikipedia: “Allen came up with the original name of Micro-Soft, a portmanteau of microcomputer and software. Hyphenated in its early incarnations,”
Guess I’ll have to tell it…
After Bill and Melinda Gates have their honeymoon, Melinda turns and says, “Now I know why you call it Micro-Soft”.
🥁🛎️
Ah, just a bad dick joke. Got ya.
