Why modernisation keeps killing the assets people use to find you.

I keep opening the wrong app.

Same Mac. Same dock. Same apps I’ve used for years. But since Apple’s latest macOS redesign, my eye keeps sliding past the thing I’m looking for.

Nothing is broken. Everything is just more alike.

Same rounded square. Same softened corners. Same neat little symbol in the middle. Apple, the most design-literate company on earth, has made its own platform harder to navigate in the name of consistency.

Developers are furious. Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis points out that when every icon is forced into the same squircle, shape stops helping people tell apps apart. Colour has to carry too much of the load. That’s why Slack and Photos now need a second look.

John Gruber put the loss in one sentence: “Shape was often the most iconic thing about an icon. Now it’s no part at all.”

Then designer Jim Nielsen found the analogy that ends the argument. Imagine redesigning road signs for consistency. The stop sign, the yield triangle, the speed limit rectangle — all the same shape now.

Tidy. Uniform. Lethal.

You don’t run a software platform, so why should you care about Mac icons?

Because Apple imposed the squircle. Most brands volunteer.

The fastest cue is the first one killed

Apple has just given us a live demonstration at global scale: remove one recognition cue from a system and people feel it immediately. Finding things gets harder. Colour gets overloaded. And when Apple offered users the option to strip colour too, with its “tinted” icon styles, uptake was near zero. One reviewer’s verdict: “My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”

Here’s why that matters on your shelf.

You read shape at distances and sizes where colour and words have already given up. That’s why you know a stop sign in fog at 100 metres. Shape is the fastest, cheapest recognition your brand will ever own.

It’s also the most defensible. Cadbury spent years in court over purple. The Coke bottle has been protected for over a century. The 1915 brief asked for a shape you’d recognise by touch in the dark, or lying broken on the ground. That’s not packaging. That’s memory you can defend in court. The Toblerone prism, the Marmite jar, the Pringles tube — same move. Shapes registered, protected, owned.

So here’s the strange part. The asset that works fastest and protects hardest is the first one to die in a redesign.

No one decision kills the asset. The logic does.

The distinctive bottle gets rationalised because the standard one runs faster on the line. The die-cut label becomes a rectangle because print efficiency says so. The structural quirk gets value-engineered out because nobody in the room could say what it was for. The design system rounds every corner to the same radius because that’s what design systems do. Each decision is defensible. Each one saves real money. And at the end of it, your brand has the same silhouette as everyone else’s — a squircle with your logo inside.

Nobody mandated any of it. Most brands climb in voluntarily and call it modernisation.

The digital shelf is squircle jail for packaging

Online, your pack doesn’t sit on a shelf. It becomes an icon.

A small tile on Ocado or Amazon — same crop, same white background, viewed at thumbnail size on a phone. The retailer has done to your pack exactly what Apple did to app icons: flattened the frame so completely that whatever recognition you have left must survive inside it.

And icons only have one job: be found fast.

The brands that survive that compression are the ones whose recognition doesn’t depend on context — a silhouette, a colour block, an asset so distinctive it still reads at 100 pixels. The brands that suffer are the ones that spent the last three redesigns sanding those assets off.

This is the first job of brand — being Found. Recognised in under a second, without the logo. And there’s a brutal little test for it: fill your pack in as a black silhouette and put it next to your competitors’. Would a shopper name yours?

For most brands, the honest answer is no. The silhouette is a rectangle. The recognition all lives in colour and logo — the cues that are hardest to own and slowest to read at a distance. That’s a brand carrying its entire memory on its weakest assets.

To be clear: the point isn’t that every brand needs a weird shape. It’s that every brand needs to know which recognition cues are load-bearing before it starts removing them. If you sell pouches, your load-bearing asset might be a colour block or a character. Fine. Know which it is — then defend it the way Coca-Cola defends the bottle.

What to do with this

Three questions, before the next refresh, rationalisation or “harmonisation” reaches your desk.

Will this make us more distinct, or just more efficient? Efficiency is fine. But if the change standardises the very thing people use to spot you, you’ve paid money to look more like the category. Apple saved nothing with the squircle — it spent distinctiveness and got uniformity.

Are we saving money, or stripping meaning? The structural quirk that annoys your operations team is often the exact thing shoppers use to find you. The Coke bottle is less efficient than a cylinder. That inefficiency is the asset.

Will anyone feel this change? Apple’s users felt it immediately — they could no longer find their apps. If your redesign passes unnoticed, you’ve made a tidiness decision. If it makes you harder to find, you’ve made an expensive one.

There’s a reason icons are called icons. Their whole job is to be recognised — instantly, effortlessly, at a glance. Your pack has the same job. Shape is the fastest way it gets done, the hardest asset for a competitor to copy, and the first thing a spreadsheet will offer to remove.

A century ago, Coca-Cola asked for a bottle you’d know in the dark. Ask the same of your brand.

Because when the answer is no, nobody sends you an angry blog post. Your shoppers just quietly stop finding you.