The relationship between keyboard manufacturers and standards bodies in various countries is so complex I barely understand a snippet of it.

The most famous example must be the 1990s PowerBooks, which had a beige variant for Germany and Germany only, to conform with local laws that prescribed and enforced specific color and contrast combinations for keyboards, in order to avoid glare and attendant ergonomic problems for terminal operators in the decades before. (It wasn’t just Apple. ThinkPads did the same.)

(I know. Jump scare!)

But you’ll understand that what caught more of my attention was an obscure variant of keyboards for (parts of?) Canada in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The white 2003 keyboard might be my favourite of Apple’s keyboard design, instantly recognizable in either the American version (more words), or the European one (more symbols):

There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard, which famously kept Control where older terminals had it – to, no doubt, delight of Japan’s programmers:

These are the three well-known layout standards. The one for Canada followed Europe, but only to a point. The layout was the same, but the symbols weren’t:

Here’s an alternate view of the European and Canadian keyboards, and you can see that the latter one introduces different, unique symbols for Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Caps Lock…

…and even goes as far as Esc. (The Esc symbol is roughly the same you see worldwide, but for some reason, Apple always shied away from putting it on even symbol-friendly keyboards – even though frustratingly it’s being used in macOS menus in all the locales.)

The story repeats itself in the middle of the keyboard. Here are, again, the US and European editions…

Canada, with its abundance of icons, makes Europe feel like America:

Even the arrows are different – here’s America vs. Canada:

Even the Enter arrow – here’s Europe vs. Canada:

And numeric Enter/​Return gets a different shape, too:

I don’t really know what is the full story here. I imagine the government exerted some pressure and Apple relented, creating a unique set of keyboards with some really ugly icons.

I know the previous two models were affected also – here’s AppleDesign keyboard from the second half of the 1990s:

You can see all the same symbols…

…and even the extra glyph for Num Lock I imagine was prescribed for the PC side, too:

And, closer to the present, I have seen examples of the first metal keyboard from the late 2000s, too. But I don’t believe these symbols are used today. Even in their heyday, I’m not sure whether they were sold in the whole of Canada, or just its French-speaking portion – if you know, please share.

It’s my understanding this is called the CSA or ACNOR keyboard. And, just like before, these symbols are in Unicode – ⇬⇭⎆⎈⇱⇲⎗⎘ – looking just as gorgeous.

That was me being sarcastic. I can imagine the pain inside Apple of someone having to put the ugly symbols coming from above, alongside otherwise generally thoughtful and refined typography. Sure, Apple did good here compared to other keyboard makers, but still, it must have hurt. This is what makes these keyboards so interesting to me.

But there’s one more symbol that might be interesting to talk about, and perhaps you already spotted it above. It’s here, on the Japanese keyboard:

This time around no standard was involved; I believe that the pencil on the Control key is solely Apple’s invention.

What is it for, and why was it there just in Japan? Typing in Japanese might be among the most complex, requiring switching between a few writing systems – katakana, hiragana, kanji, and also Western letters – as fluently as possible. To help with that, Apple used a system called Kotoeri, and added a new alternative symbol for Control that was also present onscreen, in the relevant typing menus:

The system was there in the waning years of classic Mac OS and early years of Mac OS X.

Just like with the Canadian symbols, I don’t fully know what happened to Kotoeri. I’m reading that it was gone from Mac OS X by 2014 – but even already in the years before, Apple removed the slightly pixellated symbol from their keyboards, and switched back to a standard ⌃ Control symbol in the UI.

Of course, if in the 1990s it was people in Japan who had to switch between various keyboards all time, today, thanks to emoji, it is everyone. If the Kotoeri pencil reminds you of something, Apple came back to the same well more recently with the 🌐/Fn key – but I already wrote how much I hate that.

Various old computers had their keyboards adorned with unique symbols. Companies like Commodore, Atari, Amiga, or even – in its previous life – Apple chose to put their company logos on keys, and there were other weird and obscure keys on weird and obscure keyboards.

But it was Apple’s recent push to move their American keyboards closer to European ones by embracing more iconography, that made me think of forgotten key symbols less obscure, ones that belonged to platforms we still use today. Even on a Mac and a PC, some key symbols didn’t make it to modern times. So let’s start with the PC side today since that part of the story begins earlier, and do Macs in a follow-up post.

For a lot of 20th century, a battle has been waging between words and icons. The first salvo was, perhaps, the traffic signs: America embraced words, while Europe relied more on iconography. (As much as it looks like it, it wasn’t just “graphic design vs. not”; as a more varied continent with multiple languages, Europe needed a more universal visual language to help people travelling between countries.)

This, I understand, trickled down to other things: home electronics, and computers. There, iconography also made it easier to make one product and sell it across all of Europe, without needing to introduce many SKUs with different UI strings.

Here’s IBM’s Selectric typewriter from the 1970s, in its American and European edition:

(If you’re curious, Express was a very fast Backspace, and Index moved the page down; both were prototypes of future arrow keys.)

Here’s IBM’s early 1130 computer from 1965, which sported an unusual symbol for space:

Some IBM laboratory and scientific computers in the 1970s and even 1980s veered more into iconography, but eventually lost to text as office PC users rejected the confusing symbols. As their keyboards morphed into PC/​Windows keyboards we know today, only four symbols remained and gained widespread acceptance: ⇧ for Shift, ↵ for Enter, ⇥ for Tab, and some version of an arrow for Backspace.

But let’s look at those old symbols, some beautiful, all interesting.

The two symbols below are: Print Screen (old CRT screen turning into a piece of paper) and key beep – popular when people were transitioning from loud typewriters to relatively quiet keyboards:

Here – on the front edge of the also-forgotten Reverse Tab – you can see Home, which historically meant “return to the top left corner of the screen” and sometimes even “clear the screen”:

But my favourites were these, for Insert (gone from many keyboards) and Delete (still with us):

These seem inspired by proofreader marks, which feels wonderfully old-time’y:

Building on that visual language, one could also find invert/​reverse video, blinking, and underline:

And this absolute beauty, which I think meant “delete word”:

The really interesting thing is that some of those symbols survive today in Unicode. I spotted at least ⎀, ⎃, ⎁, and ⎂. The last two are for contiguous and non-contiguous underline, which I feel is a story I should know, but I don’t (yet).

iPhone’s home button and then the swipe up home gesture are so important and well done that they probably need to be covered as Unsung Heroes, but I wanted to mention something else today as we’re revisiting the whole “app icons in squircles” story (my most recent post + Louie Mantia’s post).

The first iPhone in 2007 put apps as squircles on the home screen, and it also put a matching shape on the home button:

The shape on the button didn’t survive very long. It was removed starting with iPhone 5S in 2013, which introduced Touch ID – I guess it wasn’t possible to print the icon atop the button without sacrificing the finger detection accuracy. Then, in 2017, the button itself disappeared with the iPhone X.

The iPod Touch was the iPhone without the cellular radio – it was made from 2007 to 2019, supported all the same apps as the iPhone, and sported a home button with a squircle up until the end. (Ironically, despite its name, it never got a Touch ID.)

But there was another iPod that entered the app fray. It was the iPod Nano, whose last edition from 2012 had a home button – except it looked slightly different:

What was the reason? I don’t know if Apple ever explained it, but I believe the idea was that this iPod did not have downloadable apps, nor the App Store, nor even iOS. Those were all built-in apps, and I imagine Apple wanted to indicate visually that they’re different. Because it wasn’t just home button. The apps – eight of them, across 2 pages, although you could rearrange them! – all sported circular icons:

I don’t know if this approach was in any way effective, but I found it a funny little footnote.

Apple might have undone the macOS Tahoe menu icons decision, but this wasn’t the only contentious iconography issue in their ecosystem.

On his blog, Jim Nielsen writes how Apple filed away so much expression by forcing rigid icon bureaucracy in macOS. Nielsen focuses mostly on distinctiveness; previously, you could make the icon unique by its general shape or the shape of its contents, but one of these two levers has now been taken away:

This over-emphasis on “systems” design seems endemic to modern software. Systems prescribe rules because they are the easiest attributes to document, enforce, and automate — “All icons must use this shape, this lighting, this stroke.” Excellence, by contrast, is harder to systematize. It requires judgment, taste, care, experience, and a sensitivity to context — all in service of meaning and purpose, not superficial similarity.

However, one also can’t help but notice how ugly and amateurish the Creator Studio icons are, so it all feels absolutely like a net negative – the new system took something away and the proposed replacement feels low quality:

Elsewhere, on Rogue Amoeba’s blog, Paul Kafasis straight up asks Apple to undo the 2025 decision to contain macOS icons inside squircles:

Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it. Apple could, and should, once again allow icons to take on a wide variety of shapes.

Both these prompted me to think a bit of Apple’s app iconography as a system.

Let’s start with iOS:

• I believe the rigid squircle shape of app icons starting with the first iPhone was to make them look like a grid of buttons, and also to establish apps as a new primitive, particularly with the subsequent arrival of the App Store. (Similarly how over time “a face in a circle” became recognizable as a “personal avatar,” a user proxy primitive.)
• Soon, the rigid shape also helped when custom Springboard wallpapers arrived in 2010 – it reduced the likelihood of apps blending with the background.

• Recently, a new option has been added to remove names of apps, which is another way to disambiguate them.

• Also recently, Apple’s generally unpleasant-looking theming options (color tinting and glassification) reduced color coding as a way to recognize a particular icon.

At the same time, iOS is still highly spatial. Most apps have a specific physical place on a specific page of the Springboard, or inside a specific folder. I believe that this helps a lot even if shape coding, color coding, and name disambiguation are failing or turned off to begin with.

Now, for MacOS:

• The original Mac OS X followed in the footsteps of the classic Mac OS and allowed arbitrary shapes, allowing for more flexible shape coding, although with some guidance on angles and styling:

• However, more recently, the iOS squircle shape has been first strongly suggested (in 2020) and then rigidly enforced (in 2025) for macOS as well.

But then, the usage of app icons in macOS is different than in iOS.

First of all, macOS isn’t nearly as spatial as it used to be, and I would say not as spatial as iOS. Even Dock is more malleable compared to the memory palace rigidity of the Springboard, and its overflow section with suggestions and hand-off is very fluid. ⌘Tab is completely non-spatial and just like the Dock doesn’t upfront identify apps by their names. App icons also appear in more fluid contexts like Spotlight, Finder, and the right side of the menubar (I know iOS has some of those as well, but I would imagine they’re getting much less use overall). This all increases the pressure on icons to be easily distinguishable.

At the same time, there are fewer issues with custom backgrounds on macOS. Most icon surfaces have opaque backgrounds and while you can keep your apps on the desktop or put backgrounds in Finder windows, I don’t think that’s very common.

I’m probably missing some other aspects, but this would be my summary of where we’re at:

• Apple has not done a good job shepherding their app iconography system. The system feels too rigid, and some of its ostensible benefits (dark mode, color tinting, glassification) have been executed poorly. You could imagine a better tinting system that doesn’t feel like a cheap CSS filter applied to the icon, or (my dream!) a way to tint individual app icons. I personally love when apps – here Raindrop, Bear, and Retro – give you a lot of icon options in various colors, so I can invest in color coding:

• People’s trust in Apple’s skillset has deteriorated after the unveiling of horrendous icon redesigns in 2025’s Tahoe, and more recently in the abovementioned Creator Studio (the 2026 updates are nice, but very minor). This is in some contrast with other controversial visually-motivated changes appearing at the same time. Say what you want about Liquid Glass, but there are moments it looks absolutely gorgeous (see the video below for perhaps my favourite Liquid Glass surface). Forced menu icons felt similar: embarrassingly naïve as a system, but with icons themselves executed well (which you can still appreciate when perusing SF Symbols). But the app icon changes seem to have been assigned to the team that delivered on neither good visual craft, nor good systems thinking.

• I think it’s fair to look at Creator Studio specifically, and fear Apple is following in Microsoft’s and especially Adobe’s unforgivable footsteps in prioritizing abstract corporate identity goals over both functional and visual aspects of app iconography. Adobe’s product icons used to be beautiful and distinct before they got all shoved into the same “uppercase + lowercase letter” framework that became a canonical example of a system that took something away from the user but didn’t really give anything in return:

• I also feel this feeds right into another fear of Apple’s actions steamrolling over particularly indie app developers where being able to express one’s identity via the app icon feels much more important than it would be for a huge company.
• I don’t see Apple abandoning their stance on the rigid, distinctive app icon squircle shape. It’s possible that iOS apps will start appearing on touchscreen Macs outside of screen mirroring. Even without that, it just simplifies things for them, even if the jobs for macOS app icons are not the same as those for iOS app icons.
• At the same time, I could see Apple allowing the app icons to stick out of the basic squircle shape, like some macOS apps did in between 2020 and 2025; I believe it would even be possible to detect programmatically if the basic squircle shape is still there in the background. This would improve shape coding, and give icon designers some clearly much-desired flexibility. The icons below still register as squircles to me – why not allow this as an option? (For both macOS and iOS.)

• I wish Apple standardized app icon changing UI on iOS. Right now, each app offers their own interface in a different place – you could see that above – and rarely links to that place from the Springboard’s long-press menu. But imagine if you could nicely change app icons in situ in the same flow when you’re customizing the Springboard itself! (And then, the same for Dock and macOS.)
• I think it would also be a nice gesture to allow to rename iOS Springboard apps to whatever you want the same way you can rename folders, to give some users an opportunity to disambiguate by that if everything else fails.

Since the early 2000s, Mac OS X had a few orientations of icons depending on whether they were applications, files, utilities and so on:

In 2020, macOS Big Sur unified those styles and made them more iOS-like:

A few years later, Jim Nielsen revisited the icon “Big Sur-ification”, and showed examples of apps that did the transition really well, but also those where the transition felt… lazy, essentially shoving their previous icon into a roundrect.

For those, Nielsen proposes some alternatives that are delightful to see:

The Word/​Excel/PowerPoint/​Outlook explorations are particularly nicely done.

Just a few hours after writing about floppy disks, I stumbled upon a bona fide floppy icon in the Bluesky’s iOS app, anno domini 2026:

I imagine this, in a nerdy view deep inside settings, might be more of a fun nod, but it made me curious – does Word still use a floppy icon?

Yes, it does! Right next to the icon-less AutoSave toggle, deep within a veritable kowloon walled city of interface elements.

And yet, maybe I should chill with the jokes – NN/​Group revisited the save icon in July of last year and surprise! People still understand them.

83% of participants associated the floppy disk icon with saving. […] Another 13% described this object literally with responses such as “disk,” “disc,” or “this is an SD card for storing information.” These responses were not coded as “save,” but still suggest familiarity with the image.

What a fascinating journey! The icon didn’t change at all, but its perception went from being a literal representation of a familiar object, to a skeuomorph once floppies were replaced by hard drives, to then a symbolic representation of physical media in general (a lot of people think it’s an SD card – or perhaps even that floppy disks and SD cards are one and the same), to increasingly just an abstract symbol that represents saving as a concept, registering similarly to the circular arrows for syncing, and an arrow pointing south for downloading.

NN/​Group is itself kind of a floppy disk, trying to walk a fine line between their legacy and reinventing themselves. They’re dismissed by many as old-school, academic, boring enterprise software aficionados, relics of a different era. I see some of that and often disagree with them, but I also sometimes appreciate their rigor, reliance on user studies, and outright dismissal of fashion in UI design. I want to revisit their site in more detail and see how I feel about it today, 30 years after Jakob Nielsen’s books rocked my world.

A great post duet from Craig Hockenberry that flew by on Mastodon and clarified something for me:

[For] the extra work to create a custom SF Symbol, our experience is 8-10 hours per symbol. This is also an expert level task: lots of knowledge on how SVG control points work and how to maintain compatibility across different sizes and weights.

If you’re paying a designer to do this, the cost will be somewhere in the $1000-2000 range. For Apple this is an easy cost to absorb, for smaller developers it’s a big “nope”.

And, of course in the Mac menubar (and now iPadOS) you need a lot of them.

Another subtle example of how out of touch Apple Design is with day-to-day development.

So not only is the overiconification of menus in macOS and iPadOS a bad idea, but it’s also expensive. You could make an argument that it would push people into reusing SF Symbols – ergo “consistency” – but that would land better if we haven’t already seen even Apple is struggling with that on their own (previously, previously).

I have been wondering the other day why aren’t there more mouse pointer museums and here’s one – Amiga Pointer Archive! (Amiga was a 16-bit home computer especially popular in Europe.)

Doesn’t work so well on mobile, but it’s fun on desktop. I recommend zooming the page to 200%.

A good post by Jim Nielsen about icons in menus (in Tahoe).

This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”

It seems a necessary ingredient of introducing icons to menus is thoughtfulness and guidance around when the icons are necessary/​useful and when not.

It doesn’t help that the Tahoe icons seems to mess up indentation. (I haven’t updated to Tahoe and might skip it altogether. Even just the planetary-scale rounded corners are something that feels very broken.)