In the beginning was the icon and the icon was flat. The world was round but we believed in the icon. The icon stood for things that did exist like eternal life, universal cross-platform standards (aka world peace), tidy desks and a black and white creature called a dogcow. Like all good religions, most of it was borrowed or nicked. Xerox nicked some stuff from etch-a-sketch, Steve nicked some stuff from Xerox and Bill bought a knocked off copy from a bloke at a car boot sale. As the sun came out on the post modern, post socialist morning the faithful were rewarded with pretty pictures on their brutalist concrete walls of text DOS. The pictures became more and more complicated until it became necessary to stick post-it notes on them to explain what they meant. The original images of quaint old fashioned items like telephone dials, fountain pens, books, egg timers, trash cans and Sherlock Holmes style magnifying glasses hung around long after their meaning had been sapped out of them, but we didn’t care because we knew them and we loved them.
So where do we go from here? Why not follow the heart and dispense with any pretence of reflecting reality; the new icons will be like musical notes, abstract concepts; they have no meaning except that supplied by the context. You have to learn them, and learn to love them, hum them like your favourite tune, just as children learn the alphabet and numbers by reciting rhymes. So where can this magic come from? Designers have always looked at their own lives to find shapes and patterns for their work: the buildings they live in, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the places they go. you could say that they steal the beauty that surrounds them and make a living out of it, but it would be very sad if the sole reference for digital design was the box it came in. Fruity new hardware designs have got everybody’s taste buds tingling but the new media age won’t start until the machines become invisible.