Louie Mantia: ‘The Shape of Apps’

Louie Mantia, with a thoughtful essay on app icon design and the squircle-jail controversy on the Parakeet blog:

It’s worth noting that some of the platform’s best icons look worse, while some of the platform’s worst icons look better.

Ultimately this is what I object to with the squircle mandate. It favors the bottom of the heap by restricting the top. It makes bad icons mediocre but pushes great icons toward mediocrity too. That’s not The Macintosh Way.

Masking all of these app icons to a squircle, and even applying Liquid Glass effects to them, aims to solve this problem. And this follows the same principle of iOS 7, which is to make it easier for all apps to fit in on the platform, especially apps built by designers and developers who aren’t familiar with how to make an icon that looks great next to first-party icons.

Just so I’m clear about my preference, I would love if Apple provided a way for designers to poke outside that squircle boundary. Some of my favorite app icons did that. But also some of my least-favorite app icons ignored this shape entirely, when it was used for every system icon in the last five years. Whenever those apps showed up in my Dock, it was like a stain on my shirt I couldn’t get out.

Despite the genuine loss associated with the squircle restriction, there’s more than one way to design with it.

What a wonderful piece, and of course, it’s replete with example icons. It’s a compelling defense of the direction Apple has taken Mac app icon design.

★ Thursday, 16 July 2026