Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)

Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had:<p>- Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless<p>- Good contrast<p>- Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it&#x27;s weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they&#x27;re important on touch-enabled systems but that&#x27;s no reason to use them anywhere else.<p>- Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus<p>- And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use.<p>The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate...<p>I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you <i>need</i> to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!

I feel like older user interfaces treated me like an adult.<p>Whatever I did on Solaris [1] or even early OS X [2] felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around.<p>I don&#x27;t know what changed, I use both Linux (Gnome 3) and macOS Mojave daily but they both lack that polished &quot;workstation&quot; feel. Maybe it&#x27;s all in my head or I&#x27;m just getting old :&#x2F;<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;agilo.acjs.net&#x2F;files&#x2F;screenshot_solaris.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;agilo.acjs.net&#x2F;files&#x2F;screenshot_solaris.png</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;attachments&#x2F;picture-2-png.576210&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;attachments&#x2F;picture-2-png.57621...</a>

There’s a fashion maxim that you should look at designer magazines from 15 years ago. 15 years is about half a fashion cycle so you see the goods in their least flattering light.<p>Today that would roughly correspond to looking at Windows Mobile CE interfaces or OSX Panther&#x2F;Safari 1.0. Anything older and it starts coming back into fashion.<p>The rise of windows 95 ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ a couple of years ago and now this seems to confirm a trend. Certainly so, if you thrown in some art projects like Windows ‘93, recent fashion and music trends around vaporwave and reinterest in PC-9800 emulation.<p>Love it.

Seeing only the icons is barely half the truth. There should also be a rendering of the noise those boxes made during operation. With every movement of the mouse and each key press the hard disk made a sound as if it were being eaten by the cookie monster. And of course the disk access indicator flashed like mad all the time. Contemporary hardware seldom reaches that level of entertainment.

While I don&#x27;t agree with the article&#x27;s notion about icons, I think it&#x27;s true that 1990s UIs, especially Windows and Mac, were particularly productive OSes because they applied not just common UI idioms but standard interactions: Buttons, menus, windows, drag and drop -- everything was largely consistent between each app.<p>With the web, we had a lot of consistency for a while simply because browsers didn&#x27;t allow much customization. Initially, all links were underlined, and form buttons had to look exactly like the browser presented them. But then CSS happened and all bets were off. Underlining is largely gone as a UI idiom. It&#x27;s no longer evident if something is a link or button, whether you can right click and do &quot;open in new tab&quot; (often not possible if the link is not a URL but a JavaScript function), and so on. A &quot;native&quot; app like Slack is all over the place in terms of UI consistency, compared the strictness of the old IBM CUA standard and others. One may be productive within a single app, but not all of the idioms translate to other apps.<p>I think we&#x27;re in a transitional phase where we&#x27;re halfway between old-style GUIs and something more fluid that approximates real life to a greater degree. Consider the &quot;UI&quot; of a kitchen appliance or the packaging of a new iPhone, or a TV remote control, or just a plain old door. Everyday objects vary wildly in what &quot;idiom&quot; is provided to the user. Some doors have a handle, some have a knob, some have a bar you push. We have the same kind of annoying lack of standards and consistency in the real world, though it&#x27;s usually evident that you can turn a know and push down on a handle.<p>One can imagine a future where UIs are gesture-based, for example. Think of the 3D UI from Spielberg&#x27;s Minority Report. Some of these UIs may <i>need</i> to offer completely new way of interacting with objects (grab and make a fist to copy, open your hand wide to paste, or something) that will be difficult to standardize, much like the real world.

I love the early Windows design, especially the Windows 2000 look. Other than the well designed icons, I find it to be much more intuitive and consistent than modern Windows GUIs and Metro. Part of the reason why I use the classic style on my Windows 7 machine (the other part is better performance). I like it so much I implemented it in ReactJS <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Gikoskos&#x2F;react-win32dialog&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Gikoskos&#x2F;react-win32dialog&#x2F;</a><p>Moreover, if you guys haven&#x27;t read it yet you should definitely check out Raymond Chen&#x27;s Old New Thing, which talks about the reasoning behind some of the design choices that went down in earlier Windows desktops.

You might want to consider adding &quot;image-rendering: pixelated&quot; to your CSS; on a high-dpi monitor, these render with bilinear interpolation, which I think doesn&#x27;t do justice to the crispness of these icons.

By the criteria outlined in the article I would have thought the Windows 95 icons would be the ideal - they&#x27;re essentially the same but without the &quot;flashy&quot; gradients and other depth indications.<p>Side note: gave me some joy to read the comments and find that the ZIP file with the icons in was infected with a virus. Now <i>that&#x27;s</i> the kind of retro I can associate with Windows 98.

Windows 2000 was just about the peak of desktop interfaces from a usability and efficiency standpoint, its really only missing out on window snapping and workspaces (which is kinda a crutch for bad window management like on OSX)

I miss redhat&#x27;s bluecurve icons. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deviantart.com&#x2F;redrope&#x2F;art&#x2F;Bluecurve-Complete-Icons-1831078" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deviantart.com&#x2F;redrope&#x2F;art&#x2F;Bluecurve-Complete-Ic...</a>

From the article:<p>&gt; Rather than some designer’s flashy vision of the future, Windows 98 icons made the operating system feel like a place to get real work done. They had hard edges, soft colors and easy-to-recognize symbols.<p>The change is deliberate and reflects a social shift. In the W98 days computers were primarily seen as work devices, and in particular Windows wanted to distinguish itself from the more playful feeling Mac (which itself chose a more playful feel to address the fear most people felt about their computers. Apple tried to repeat the Mac playful feeling with the iMac and early OS X feel, and while it helped a bit in the consumer market it reinforced that feeling that they weren&#x27;t for actual work.<p>And though it feels like it, this relationship hasn&#x27;t changed! The (often forced) playful feeling of modern UIs comes from the phone and the phone was able to succeed there -- even need it -- because 1&gt; people were already comfortable with a non-professional connection to the web, mail, messaging et al and 2&gt; it was a &quot;phone&quot;, not a &quot;computer&quot;. This didn&#x27;t worry Nokia or Microsoft at first because they had &quot;professional&quot; devices, and probably we forget the days of carrying a work and personal phone for phone calling. But then since the work phones were so crappy they were able to capture the mindshare.<p>I think it&#x27;s gone the wrong way: because phones are worth so much, much less effort goes into designing &quot;work&quot; apps, and the designers all start mobile -&gt; web -&gt; desktop.

I think nostalgia plays a part for sure, but there&#x27;s also substance about the old UIs.<p>Looking at Win98 icons reminds me of my days in high school when I would just tinker around Windows for fun, changing icons of shortcuts, make good ol&#x27; personal homepages in HTML and Javascript (mostly alert boxes), and play Starcraft 1 and Diablo 2. The icons and the Win98 UI give me pleasant feelings, mostly coming from those experiences.<p>On the substance side -- this isn&#x27;t exactly about Windows, but in the last couple of years I&#x27;ve tried a variety of Linux distros and DEs. Specifically, I&#x27;ve tried CentOS 7 KDE, Antergos Gnome 3, and Manjaro 18 KDE, all on laptops. There&#x27;s no doubt that both Antergos and Manjaro bring with them very modern DEs (regardless of Gnome or KDE). But for some reasons, I felt the most productive on the CentOS 7 KDE, even though it looks the most primitive. Before I had the Manjaro laptop, I thought it was a KDE vs Gnome difference (KDE being more similar to Windows, vs Gnome being more similar to macOS, and I generally prefer Windows), but I think it actually does come down to the UI design. CentOS 7&#x27;s KDE looks very dated, but everything is very functional and took little customization to feel productive in. The difference is similar to Win98&#x2F;2000 vs Win7&#x2F;8&#x2F;10.

I also think the aesthetic of classic Mac OS, like versions 8 and 9, as well as BeOS had great design that made it easy to know what widgets were what and how to interact with them.

I was so disappointed with Visual Studio 2018 when somebody decided to remove all the colors from the icons. This made users guess the icon only by its outline. The icon color design of windows 98, 2000 and xp were great, i miss it so much.

Amazingly, moricons.dll is still included with Windows 10. This contains icons from Windows 3.0.<p>(it should be called &quot;moreicons.dll&quot;, but this was from when filenames had to be 8 + 3 characters long)

Windows ME&#x2F;2000 icons were even better.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;sl&#x2F;8&#x2F;8e&#x2F;Win2000.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;sl&#x2F;8&#x2F;8e&#x2F;Win2000.png</a>

I think windows 95&#x2F;98 interface was great. I don&#x27;t want ads when I click on the start button. All they needed was to add a search bar and call it a day instead all these ads or apps you don&#x27;t want.

In analyses like these, one thing often gets lost: interfaces are a product of their specific time, not just of a linear evolutionary process confined to the type of product being discussed. No product exists in a timeless state, yet retrospectives such as this one attempt to judge products as though they are this thing that’s frozen outside of the space-time-culture continuum.<p>So, for these “productive interfaces” let’s keep in mind the goal Microsoft had at the time, which was to get people and businesses to buy Windows machines in bulk for serious, office-centric work. The abilities of the new, less complicated graphical UI had to be rendered in a way that made it feel just as serious as the more complicated text-based interfaces ... or paper binders, even.<p>Moving forward to things like OS X or iOS, the goals of the encompassing products clearly are different. In these cases the interfaces are attempting to permeate the non-work lives of people otherwise not forced to “work” with computers, in ways they would enjoy using outside of a work context. The goal was to NOT feel like work.<p>Why is this contextual distinction important? Let’s assume people come to HN to learn. I certainly do. It’s a great place to learn about technology, science, and about building products and companies. From that perspective, it’s worthwhile that we develop some rigor in how we reason about designs and the way they were packaged into a sellable entity. When we judge products historically, statements of an absolute qualitative nature like this one are just fine ... but they are often the equivalent of latching on to one article about a single mouse study, never looking at previous work, not checking the references, ignoring available meta-analyses and so on. All the stuff that is rightfully frowned upon when it comes to scientific research. Clearly product quality is tremendously more subjective than science, but throwing all objective perspectives out of the window is a trend that won’t guide our discussions to the kinds of product insights the HN audience would benefit from the most.

Funny how the icon of a floppy disk which was used to represent saving is slowly being phased out because the new generations have never even handled a floppy, so they don&#x27;t remember how crucial it was to put files on floppy before storing them somewhere safe (or handing them over to a colleague&#x2F;friend). I even had a floppy organizer in my desk drawer with fresh labels and sharpies, and peeling off old labels was actually satisfying back then.

No accounting for taste, but to me those icons are rather unsightly. From a utilitarian point of view, they might be good, but for art (at the time) I would have looked at NeXT icons.

I hate the frequently excessive usage of icons in modern UIs. In icon-heavy UIs, the meaning&#x2F;functionality of an icon isn&#x27;t very clear and labels only show up when you hover a mouse over the icon (you&#x27;re usually out of luck if you&#x27;re on mobile).

I prefer the Windows 95 icons, e.g. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;windows95tips.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;35587792563" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;windows95tips.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;35587792563</a>

Wow, this entire thread is so weird to read! I find these icons really bad compared to what exists on Windows 10 for example, and yet everyone seems to agree that 98&#x27;s icons are better! I mean, seeing the icons in the illustration, I have no idea what 3 out of the 6 do. In the image at the bottom of the article it&#x27;s even worse<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure it&#x27;s just nostalgia, I have no idea why everyone here seems to think they&#x27;re objectively better

BeOS is peak UI design for me. I&#x27;m actually working with Haiku OS sometimes to feel this vibe.

I miss Windows 2000.<p>3.11 and earlier were utter garbage. I was on an Amiga, and so thankfully avoided those steaming piles.<p>95, 98, and ME were brutal operating systems, crashing all the time, corrupting data, and generally making life hell. There was an NT 3.51 mod that would give it the win95 interface, but there were too many software compatibility issues. Amiga was dead, so I switched to Red Hat.<p>Then came Windows 2000. A nice, clean interface. Speedy operating system. Real memory protection. Most things were in sane places. It got out of your way and let you get real work done.<p>When XP came out, I didn&#x27;t really see the point. It had graphics that looked like a candy bar and slowed things down enormously. Thankfully, you could disable it. I&#x27;m still not sure what they actually improved in that operating system to make actual, real work easier to perform, but whatever they did, it took twice the memory to do it, and required a beefier processor.<p>Then came Vista, which was unbearably slow. I upgraded to XP during this time because my software wouldn&#x27;t run on 2000 anymore.<p>Windows 7: A New Hope. It was still slow, but it turned out to be not an unbearable upgrade, although I still stuck to XP for as long as I could.<p>Windows 8: Bigger. Slower. Unfathomable. I stuck to 7 through gritted teeth.<p>Now we&#x27;re at Windows 10. Schizoid is the best word I can use to describe it. Horrible UI half in the Vista world, half in the mobile world, Duplication everywhere, no clear path for getting things done, constant updates at inconvenient times (you can&#x27;t seem to get even a month of uptime with this OS).<p>I&#x27;ve since switched to Ubuntu, and run my Windows software in Wine.

I found the original Mac, or the DR GEM icons (e.g. on Atari ST) even more utilitarian (could one call them &#x27;brutalist&#x27; ?) and may I say &#x27;pleasant&#x27;.<p>In that vein, sometimes I wish for a desktop that is grayscale except for exceptional highlights (e.g., photos, warnings, ...). I remember that it was a real pleasure to use the Atari SM124 B&amp;W CRT monitor.

Most of these were from Windows 95. They got some slight cosmetic improvements in 98 and then again for 2000 if I remember correctly.

Interesting to see how much current design has affected my gut reaction. At first my mind immediately went to &quot;there&#x27;s no way this is the case...&quot;<p>But looking at Win98 icons and UI... I really do miss that interface. Contrast and buttons actually being buttons... etc<p>I think (despite my use of Win10 and MacOS for various reasons) that&#x27;s why I have a love of Linux UIs... many of them hearken back to those days.<p>The Linux DEs I tend to gravitate to are the ones that are most like classic Windows UI

There has been a shift towards UI that gets out of the way and becomes second nature to us. Admittedly that dream hasn&#x27;t yet fully been realized, but we are on that path. Removing clutter, HDD led light, noiseless computers all imo try to integrate computers ever more fully into our lives and make it as seamless as an integration as possible. One day we may have UI that feels so natural that we might just think of a computer as one of our organs.

The designers were a very well coordinated integrated group (if there was more than one of them) and they took design imperatives of a restricted palette and fixed pixel sizes to heart.<p>If you asked the same group to design this now in a world of high dpi high gamut screens they might not get the same constraints out in their design brief.<p>Google&#x27;s work on flat responsive was in some ways running against the tide. Skuomorphic was hardly ancient when the Google reaction happened

The fact that the article has nearly no content besides &quot;these are cool&quot; and the comments on it say the download has a virus in it makes me very dubious.

The icons are nice, but I&#x27;ve never known what 90% of them were supposed to represent. Still can only guess at many of them.<p>I do like the depth though

The Windows 98 interface was actually not bad. There only issue I had was that to stop the computer you click on Start. :-)

I&#x27;m sure we will go full circle back to that style soon enough, but with higher resolution and expanded color palette.

I collected 131,788 icons from that era as 32x32 PNG files, and made a simple search program for them. Does anyone have good ideas for using this dataset?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iconpush.github.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iconpush.github.io</a>

I tried very hard using bash scripting and some recursive archive extraction stuff to get all the icons out... but I couldnt get all the names, and I got a lot of false positives. Id be interested to know how the author did this.

No they are not. Simply no! Wanna some really good and useful icons? Go get them at KDE. Those... Things sucks. Big. Time. Is that some hipster phoney nostalgia article of some sort? Please...

Ok, follow your tip. Look those nice w9x icons? do the same with your fonts.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contrastrebellion.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contrastrebellion.com&#x2F;</a>

Who was the designer? What’s the license&#x2F;copyright situation?

Classic Shell helps bring us back to this design. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.classicshell.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.classicshell.net&#x2F;</a>

I wish there was a comparison with Windows 95 icons.

I wish we could get a modern spin on this style

great from the same site, possibly nsfw <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alexmeub.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;celery-man&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alexmeub.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;celery-man&#x2F;</a>

They irony is that the icons are the opposite to the font colors. Please:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contrastrebellion.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contrastrebellion.com&#x2F;</a>

Sorry, as a Mac user then and now, they still look as cheesy as they did back then to me.<p>Not that Windows looks nice these days either.

Totally agree with you

You should&#x27;ve linked to the https version of the page so the dozens of icons load faster (because of http2 multiplexing)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;win98icons.alexmeub.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;win98icons.alexmeub.com&#x2F;</a>

Meh. They look very dated to me.

While they may have been good for the time, it’s pretty hard to distinguish a lot of these while looking at my smartphone, especially when I’m not wearing glasses.