Golden Gate Menu Icons
macOS Tahoe threw an icon on every menu item, making them impossible to distinguish at a glance. macOS Golden Gate has rectified that design taboo with blessedly iconless menus.
In macOS 27.0, menu bar and context menus present a reduced set of menu item images, similar to the behavior prior to macOS 26.0. By default,
NSMenuhides all menu item symbol images — non-symbol images remain visible. For menu items created from a xib file,NSMenualso observes the value of the “macOS 26.0 only” checkbox in the menu item inspector. If this checkbox is unchecked, the menu item image remains visible; if checked, it is hidden. These changes in menu item image visibility apply to applications linked on macOS 26.0 and later. Review the updated Human Interface Guidelines to determine which menu items in your app should still display images. Use the newpreferredImageVisibilityproperty onNSMenuItemto customize the image visibility for your menu items. As in macOS 26.0,NSMenuautomatically provides default visible menu item images for certain common system-wide menu items, such as Settings, Share, and Print.
„Icons in menus are now hidden by default“ and you can specifically enable them to draw attention to the most important actions.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a great change! But to take a full year and your lead designer leaving to figure out that this was a mistake… woof…
I like that Menu Icons now are hidden by default again on macOS - Quite a lot of concessions towards liquid glass being the wrong move last year. Takes courage to take so many steps back, literally. I’m appreciating that. Even if they present it as improvements rather than “undo” - that’s just what one has to do for marketing.
Previously:
Wonderful news in MacOS 27 Golden Gate: the icons are gone. It’s like Tahoe’s menu item icons never happened. Prokopov noted it on Mastodon with before and after screenshots, and mentions that Apple has updated the Human Interface Guidelines accordingly[…]
[…]
This is my favorite news from all of WWDC this week.
Kudos to Nielsen and Prokopov for pushing on this and explaining the problem so well. This wasn’t about ugly icons. This was about improper use and misunderstanding of iconography.
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Now get rid of the corners at the top of menus and connect them to the menubar again. They're menus, not windows.
Using images in a menu item still screws up the vertical alignment of menu item titles that *don't* use images (item titles do not vertically align). This makes vertical scanning harder and negatively affects readability. Compare this to status "checkmarks" that make every item in a menu get its own "column" to improve vertical scanning.
Just ship apps using:
`[NSUserDefaults.standardUserDefaults registerDefaults:@{ @"NSMenuEnableActionImages" : @(NO) }];`
Do we know if the following defaults command to remove menu icons still works on the macOS 27 beta?
defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO
@Ben G
The great sadness, is that the current generation of UI designers working on the Mac fundamentally don't understand the spatial layering of the Mac UI.
The Menubar is a proscenium arch, the most forward surface on the screen. The Menus are flats, that fall from *behind* that arch. Everything else, is layered deeper within the theatre stage's space.
What built the Mac in the first place, was that no one working on it was a computer UI designer, they were all people from traditional arts disciplines who made an electronic version of their analogue tools.
Modern Apple designers, they're like a ouroboros (or human centipede), going round and round inputting on their own output, and just sinking into "model collapse" as they create Mannerist pastiches of what went before, with no real understanding of the underlying bones.
I must be the only person that liked those menu item icons.
They were great for environments where you jump from one computer set to English, another set to a CJK language. I could quickly identify the menu item I need by seeing those icons rather than having to vaguely remember the approximate location in the menu of the item I want, then spent extra seconds *reading* them in the foreign language and mentally translating what they do. A lot of menu item terms have specific non-daily-usage translations that are specific and explicit to those commands. You often *need* to know them; guessing is hard. But the icons made all of that irrelevant. It was a more universal menu item "language" of its own. Sorry to see them go.
Can we all agree to stop calling Alan Dye a designer? Nothing about 26 was designed. It was just a big mess of bad ideas.
