All These Icons Used By Apple Have Vintage, Non-Digital Origins

What the heck does that command symbol really mean?
Apple's icons and designs are a big deal. Apple defines itself as a design company, for instance. It prides itself on making the most beautiful as well as the most functional products.

Part of Apple's design philosophy is to keep things simple: The company believes that users shouldn't need instructions on how to operate its gadgets, it should just be obvious.

One way Apple has achieved that is by using a series of longstanding icons that we've all come to recognize. These symbols are so familiar, we don't need to be told what to do.

Apple has mostly followed a "skeuomorphic design" strategy: its symbols look like literal representations of the objects they represent, so the Newsstand app appears to have wooden shelves, just like an actual newsstand. (And at one point there was a sort of civil war inside the company over whether this skeuomorphism had gone too far.)

As such, a lot of Apple's icons have decidedly vintage, non-digital origins. We bet you don't know what the curly square on the command key started out as, for example ...


You've probably never thought twice about the Apple "command" key on the lower left portion of your keyboard. But where does that curly square symbol come from?

pj_vanf / Flickr, CC

It's actually taken from a Swedish road sign used to indicate tourist attractions.

The Swedish road sign that became the Apple command key.
Wikimedia, CC

The story goes that Steve Jobs became annoyed that the Apple symbol was being used too much on devices in 1983. So bitmap artist Susan Kare looked through a book of international symbols to replace the Apple command, and picked one that denotes campground attractions and ancient monuments in Scandinavia. It's been there ever since.

It is sometimes also called the pretzel key.


Why is the "return" key so named?

Visual Density / Flickr, CC

Originally, the "carriage return" was the lever on a typewriter you had to pull to start a new line of words on the page.

mpclemens / Flickr, CC

Why do Apple's "play," "stop" and "fast forward" buttons look that way?


They come from the days when recordings were made on tape. The reason the "play" arrow faces right is because tapes used to spool from left to right when played.

Panasonic / B&H Photo

This is Apple's famous logo. It originates from something that has nothing to do with computers ...

iPad Insight via Flickr

Apple's original logo showed Newton sitting under an apple tree, where he was inspired to develop his theory of gravity. Apples were also one of founder Steve Jobs' favorite fruits.

Apple, Inc.

Ever wondered where the Siri (or voice dictation) icon comes from?

Steve Troughton-Smith

It's a stylized version of a vintage microphone from the early 20th Century.

Roadside Guitars / Flickr, CC

This icon tells you how much power you have left in your phone. In real life, however ...


Apple's batteries look nothing like the traditional battery symbol it uses. In most Apple products, you can't even see the batteries.

Matti Mattila / Flickr, CC

The video icon has nothing to do with digital video ...


It's a movie slate clapperboard, the thing they use to mark scenes to make film editing easier.

Warner Bros. / Facebook

If you haven't examined the App Store icon closely you might not have noticed that ...


It's not simply a capital "A." It's a pencil, brush and ruler arranged into the form of an "A."


This ought to be an easy one: You know this is the iPhone's phone call symbol. But Apple has never made a phone that looks like that ...


The symbol comes from this type of rotary dial phone, which hasn't been in general use since the early 1990s.

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