It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

Niki agrees with my reasoning that putting an icon in every menu item is insanity:

It’s delusional to think that there’s a good icon for every action if you think hard enough. There isn’t. It’s a lost battle from the start.

Also: I loved this point because it illustrates how SVGs are great and superior to bitmap graphics in so many cases, but not every case:

For Tahoe icons, Apple decided to use vector fonts instead of good old-fashioned bitmaps. It saves Apple resources—draw once, use everywhere. Any size, any display resolution, any font width.

But there’re downsides: fonts are hard to position vertically, their size doesn’t map directly to pixels, stroke width doesn’t map 1-to-1 to pixel grid, etc. So, they work everywhere, but they also look blurry and mediocre everywhere::

Classic software: it’s trade-offs everywhere!