Louie Mantia, with a thoughtful essay on app icon design and the squircle-jail controversy on the Parakeet blog:
It’s worth noting that some of the platform’s best icons look
worse, while some of the platform’s worst icons look better.
Ultimately this is what I object to with the squircle mandate. It favors the bottom of the heap by restricting the top. It makes bad icons mediocre but pushes great icons toward mediocrity too. That’s not The Macintosh Way.
Masking all of these app icons to a squircle, and even applying
Liquid Glass effects to them, aims to solve this problem. And
this follows the same principle of iOS 7, which is to make it
easier for all apps to fit in on the platform, especially apps
built by designers and developers who aren’t familiar with how to
make an icon that looks great next to first-party icons.Just so I’m clear about my preference, I would love if Apple
provided a way for designers to poke outside that squircle
boundary. Some of my favorite app icons did that. But also some of
my least-favorite app icons ignored this shape entirely, when it
was used for every system icon in the last five years. Whenever
those apps showed up in my Dock, it was like a stain on my shirt
I couldn’t get out.Despite the genuine loss associated with the squircle restriction,
there’s more than one way to design with it.
What a wonderful piece, and of course, it’s replete with example icons. It’s a compelling defense of the direction Apple has taken Mac app icon design.
