Ask Lemmy

"I have updated the save icon from a floppy disk to a CD-ROM."

How about something like that? Symbolises data to device.

Or just the hard drive by itself. Is a platter drive old fashioned these days?

Also a safe would be a decent choice.

You're asking for an abstract indicator of a concept. You might as well be trying to draw 'dignity'.

Everything else will become obsolete with time, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. We have countless icons that have long since been separated from their original meanings. The need for it to be intuitive is when the concept is new, not as it changes.

Assuming that I can't rely on real life's ubiquitous floppy disk icon, I think something with a bookshelf is probably my best bet. An arrow pointing to the bookshelf for save, away for load. Bookshelves can be recognisable as pretty small icons and a physical book is extremely broadly understood. It may eventually fail if everyone moves to e-readers, but I think that's a long way off

Anything designed to represent the save action will become obsolete eventually because the nature of saving data changes.

Originally you saved writing by inscribing it on a wax tablet, then paper, then removable disk, then hard disk, then solid state, now the cloud.

I would say the most times less will be pencil on paper as it's the most basic method of recording.

📝

But that's already considered to mean an edit action

A pencil writing on paper.

Assuming we're talking about "anyone" including a post-collapse society or an alien race that never invented the floppy, and sufficiently advanced to competently use a computer. The most basic means of recording information is to use an implement to create marks on a surface. You can draw lines in the sand, or indentations on a clay tablet, or scratches on a lead sheet, or lines on a paper, the method usually involves a flat surface and a pointy object leaving visible lines. The symbolic representation of a pencil and paper is sufficiently generic that most people will associate it with committing information to a non-volatile medium.

Almost none of our symbols make sense and are disconnected from their origin. That's a good thing. Without detachment of the signs from their reference we can't have abstract thought and language. The letter D comes from an icon for fish. But it went from indexical reference to icon, to symbol. And then we changed its shape over time to what it is today, and some people started using it for the alveolar plosive. The same has happened for every single symbol we recognize and use, alphabet or not. It's all arbitrary and it doesn't matter if we don't use actual floppy disks anymore.

Down arrow pointing to a horizontal line.

Maybe something like a document going into a safe? As things are increasingly digital, both of those technologies become somewhat less relevant. On the other hand, one could go with 保存 on a button. Chinese and Japanese speakers will instantly know what it does. Others could learn. At some point, kanji are just slightly more complex squiggles to represent an increasingly non-concrete thing.

The word "save" localized appropriately.

Two types:

1. "Save state" like in video games or word processors

• For saving state in current application
• There is hard disc / cloud saving

2. "Save file" like in web browsers

• This is for creating a copy of a file you found and want to keep
• There is hard disc / cloud saving

In both cases you will want to signify saving to disc (this could look like a thick round disc) versus saving to the cloud