A better save icon

Via Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium by Simon Darby

Who wouldn’t like to be the designer of the icon that ‘saved’ the 21st century?

Google Material Design Save Icon

The current floppy disk save icon seems so dated. Google have done a nice job of their version in Material Design, but it still echos technology from 1980.

Many of you reading this will never have used or even seen a real floppy disk anyway. The save icon is based on the 3½-inch microfloppy disks. The diskettes, as they were also known, were basically a thin magnetic round wafer inside a plastic shell. The microfloppy ranged from 360kb to a massive 1.44mb. That tiny size today hardly represents the concept of saving anything of value.

As an icon, it was perfect in 1980. Today, not so much.

So what’s a better save icon? Based on Google Ma terial Design I pondered this. It literally needs to be truely iconic. I don’t know that any of these designs are it, but it would be nice to see some fresh thinking from designers.

This is one of those design problems that gets debated every blue moon, but so far nothing seems to be a strong contender to replace the venerable floppy disk. Yet it seems a challenge designers should take up. Who wouldn’t like to be the designer of the icon that ‘saved’ the 21st century?

Fun fact: My first laptop had no hard drive, just two floppy disk (disc) drives. One for the Microsoft OS and apps, and one for my files.

https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href

A better save icon was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A better save icon

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