There’s a design principle I return to often: if everything is emphasized, nothing is. Bold every word in a paragraph and you’ve just made regular text harder to read. Highlight every line in a document and you’ve defeated the purpose of highlighting.

Nikita Prokopov applies this to Apple’s macOS Tahoe, which adds icons to nearly every menu item:

Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.

The whole article is a detailed teardown of the icon choices—inconsistent metaphors, icons reused for unrelated actions, details too small to parse at 12×12 effective pixels. But the core problem isn’t execution. It’s the premise.

Prokopov again:

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.

What makes this such a burn is that Apple knew better. Prokopov pulls from the 1992 Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, which warned that poorly used icons become “unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating.” Thirty-two years later, Apple built exactly that.

This applies beyond icons. Any time you’re tempted to apply something universally—color, motion, badges, labels—ask whether you’re helping users find what matters or just adding visual noise. Emphasis only works through contrast.