I have long been amused by this — and it shows the dominance of marketing.<p>> Of course, there's only so many ways to draw a cloud, right?<p>Well into the early ‘00s I would draw the ‘cloud’ (typically on a white board) the way it appeared in the early TCP papers (the origin of the term): a more vaguely symmetrical or “round” shape, not something with a sharp straight bottom. A “dust cloud”, if you will, that obscured its inner workings.<p>But of course once they heard engineers use that words, marketers misunderstood the metaphor, drew a cumulus cloud, and ran with it. And now we have a metaphor that doesn’t actually mean anything. As usual.
The common feature to the cloud icons elsewhere in the article is "Two bumps on top, one large and one small" - whereas in the BBC weather screen capture, the clouds have a single bump on top.<p>Of course, it's normal for icons to look similar - they're trying to symbolise the same thing - same as different fonts are trying to depict the same letters.
See also: The one, the only, photograph of Earth (2001). <a href="https://neil.fraser.name/writing/earth/" rel="nofollow">https://neil.fraser.name/writing/earth/</a>
There is only one cloud icon in the entire universe that keeps going back and forth in time. As it is going backwards in time, it appears to us as an anti cloud icon.
Clouds on the Noun Project
<a href="https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=cloud" rel="nofollow">https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=cloud</a>
I work as a designer, and this golden ratio thing is hilarious. The only designers who consciously use the golden ratio are junior designers eager to find some deep, mystic design rule that will guarantee all their designs to be beautiful.<p>Everything looks like the golden ratio if you squint hard enough.<p><a href="https://www.fastcodesign.com/3044877/the-golden-ratio-designs-biggest-myth" rel="nofollow">https://www.fastcodesign.com/3044877/the-golden-ratio-design...</a>
The same goes for many other icons. Like rss, wifi, and shutdown icon.<p>It makes sense, because once an icon becomes popular reinventing it with another design makes people confused.