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The Save Icon

Let's play a game! It's called "Save or Download?"

Round One

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Round Two

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So

The joke goes that a 3.5" floppy disk is pointed out by a younger person and called a "3D printed save icon". They have been irrelevant to the majority of people for at least 15 years, but they still appear on the toolbars of computer programs even today.

Why 3.5"?

I suspect it's down to timing. Toolbars weren't initially a thing, as pull-down menus were the way you interacted with software. To save, you'd use File - Save.

I'm not sure what the first program was to have a toolbar, but Microsoft Word 1.0 for Windows (1989) had something they called a "ribbon" (yes, like the Office 2007 ribbon!). You were able to choose typefaces and styles with it, but there were no buttons for loading or saving until Word 2.0.

By the time toolbars became standard in software, 5.25" floppy disks were on the way out and 3.5" ones were becoming popular.

Replacement?

The first question we have to ask is, does it need to be replaced? My argument is that it doesn't.

How old is the pilcrow symbol (¶)? It's got to be hundreds of years old, and yet that's on word processor toolbars too. Generally speaking, we all know what it means and does. I posit that the younger generations will see and know what the disk icon means too, without necessarily ever seeing a floppy disk.

The other question is, if it should be replaced, what should we use instead? I certainly don't support the use of downward pointing arrows, which are already associated with downloading from networks (down=down, after all).

Perhaps we could look to Lotus, who used this as their save icon years ago:

That is, a slanted arrow pointing into a folder. It goes right back to the Xerox desktop metaphor - putting something in a physical folder.

Conclusion

I hope the practice of using down arrows to mean "save" doesn't catch on.

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