We rely on icons every day, not just to guide us through a digital system, but to do so quickly, without words. Icons, however, are not fixed. They age. They fade. And because of this, they can eventually fail.

In earlier articles, we looked at how some symbols are so ingrained in our lives that we consider them intuitive, whereas they were learned. This article is about what happens when those learned meaning begin to decay and icons that were once most trusted start to become silent failures. This is when an icon’s origin is forgotten, but the symbol persists, and new generations of users cannot reconcile the visual with the function. We look at the natural lifecycle of digital icons and how we should deal with icon decay.

From Familiar to Fossil

If we create a timeline of obsolescence, we will note that icons do not disappear when their reference objects do. They linger and often for decades. Think of the following:

•             💾 The floppy disk was largely obsolete by 2005, yet it remains the universal symbol for “Save.”

•             📁 Folders made sense in the early days of desktop computing but are now abstract containers to many users.

•             📷 The camera icon still often depicts a lens-based body, long gone from most people's actual photography tools.

Here, we are seeing semantic drift. This is where the visual no longer carries a literal meaning. It has become a learned convention, untethered from its origin.

This is not normally a problem until it becomes one. For digitally fluent users, the habit of using that icon to perform a familiar task compensates for the lack of resonance between image and function. Eventually, though, icon decay can create user friction, confusion and even disengagement.

What Are the Signs of Icon Decay?

Obsolescence of icons does not happen overnight. It moves through stages:

1.       Recognition: everyone knows what the icon is and what it does: it does what it says on the tin.

2.       Reliance: People are so used to the function that the icon enables that they stop thinking about the referent object. They use it by habit, the stuff of muscle memory.

3.       Separation: Users no longer recognise the object only the function. Again, muscle memory until there is a significant update in operating, such as a new version of Windows.

4.       Confusion: New users do not recognise what the icon stands for and what its function is.

By stage 4, the icon becomes a dead metaphor. The icon, however, is still in use but it is detached from understanding.

You can test this:

Ask a child or teenager, people who would otherwise be digital natives, what the 💾 function does, they are likely to tell you that it ‘saves’ your work. But ask them what the object is, then they may not be able to tell you.

At this point, the icon still ‘functions’, but it fails to communicate.

Why Does This Matter?

In everyday apps, confusion over icons is a mild inconvenience. In critical systems like health, however, it is a very different story.

Visuals are often used in:

·       Instructions about medicines.

·       Consent forms.

·       Health app navigation.

·       Emergency alerts.

If a patient misinterprets an icon related to timing, dosage or action, the result could be real harm.

Icon failure also creates issues of accessibility, such as:

·       Older users may find newer icons unintuitive or alienating.

·       Younger users encountering icons undergoing decay may miss the context entirely.

·       Non-native language speakers rely more heavily on icons, so misinterpretation is more likely.

In other words, icon decay is not just a matter of aesthetics. It is functional, cultural and ethical.

How Do We Recognise the Fade?

We have seen that icons are not permanent. Their meaning fades unless we reinforce, reframe or replace them.

We need to acknowledge ‘icon vitality’ and ‘icon health’ and track this by identifying the early stages of when a symbol no longer communicates clearly. What is the solution? It does not have to be scrapping the legacy icon. It could be visually updated or simplified, paired with text and tooltips.

But the most important question is: Are we designing for understanding or just out of habit with little new thinking?

The next article looks at how to respond to icon decay and asks if it is possible to build iconography that stands the test of time.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, April 2025