On the “Floppy Disk” Save Icon

From a Daring Fireball reader, I love this quote on how outdated the “floppy disk” metaphor used in pretty much every application for Save My Data is.

I help out in an elementary school, sometimes in the computer lab, and always get a laugh out of how there is absolutely no way to convey to a bunch of 8 year old kids which button they should click to save without physically pointing it out or describing the one next to it.

Tell them to “click the disk” and they look around for a CD icon. Tell them to “click the floppy disk” and they laugh at the word “floppy.” The machines have floppy disk drives, but the kids have never seen them used.

Considering the variety of media saving could possibly happen on, I’m not quite sure what a reasonable icon for the Save function would be. A safe? A hard disk? The cloud? There doesn’t seem to be a single unifying metaphor which could be used across applications; perhaps the disk is correct if only because it’s consistent once people are taught its meaning.