Are all these icons black-and-white? It seems to be fashionable to use monochrome colors for icons these days (Gmail, many mobile and desktop apps). It makes for a sleek and calm interface. I think its choosing the easy way out. Instead of picking a good pallet and shapes, just remove the colors and all of a sudden a seemingly unrelated set of graphics has something very distinctive in common (it worked particularly well for me in a small newspaper where low quality photos were contributed by different authors, just make them grayscale, voila).
Really, color is such a great way to convey information.
These are for use in menus, submenus, notification areas, toolbars and the like. Locations where you'll be presented with a few choices that are easily distinguishable. They're not designed to be app icons. They're designed not to distract away from the rest of the app, especially the content.
For the curious, these are licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0, which means they need to be attributed and you must share changes. This unfortunately means they are incompatible with the GPL and similar licenses.
Interestingly, the "SAVE" icon is still a floppy disk[1]. Sure, its stylized a bit, but it is definitely recognizable as a floppy disk from the 80's.
How many years have to elapse before that icon is rethought? When was the last time you personally held an actual floppy disk? How would you even fit a floppy disk into a phone (or website)?
Many other icons in the set are also anachronisms, or will soon be. An alarm clock with two bells. A credit card with a magnetic stripe. A paper calendar with ring binders. A two-roll tape recorder ("voice mail", apparently).
Personally I think that the floppy disk is a good icon precisely because it has ceased to be an everyday physical object. Today, the outline of a 3.5" disk simply means "save" -- there's no other valid association for this shape any more.
That is the original definition of an icon: an image that transcends its apparent meaning. Orthodox Christian icons were certainly representational, but the presence of holiness was communicated by a commonly understood system of signs that went beyond the level of appearances.
A more modern example of an icon in this sense could be Andy Warhol's images of Marilyn Monroe: calling them "silk-screened reproductions of the portrait of an actress" doesn't capture anything about their cultural meaning.
">How many years have to elapse before that icon is rethought? When was the last time you personally held an actual floppy disk? How would you even fit a floppy disk into a phone (or website)?"
I don't think any of that matters.
How many smartphones run on AA batteries [1]? How many people have ever configured anything involving gearing [2]?
Rethinking an icon feels like a contradiction. It doesn't matter what it's 'supposed' to be.
This doesn't get me nearly as much as the fact that smartphones are called phones, and probably will be for the forseeable future.
The save icon may be anachronistic, but a hardware drive is still an accurate representation of what's happening. Today's phones are about as much about phoning as computers are about word processing.
It is always good to see open sourced icons. I have always ignored most important parts of UI/UX. It would be great if somebody can provide some insights about why material design is so important and what is so good about it?
Did you read all of it? Scaling to arbitrary device sizes and between input types seems to be a principal consideration here, and my "gut feeling" is it would work.
I can see the animation principles (for instance) being applied from a smartwatch, all the way through 4K displays.
Since most of the points aren't just "declared good" but come with justification, it would be trivial to try to rebuff them, rather than dismiss them with a general argument.
Edit: I'm talking about the spec rather than the actual icons. The icons themselves are scalable as well.
Scaling the vector images is technically doable, but having them look good is another matter. Traditionally a lot of low-sized icons are hand massaged, otherwise due to the scaling you inevitably have most of the boundaries sitting across pixels and everything is quite fuzzy. I found with these that when they dropped sub 128px I was struggling to determine what they were attempting to describe without resorting to the captions. I know that this is less and less of a deal with high resolution displays, but it's still worth considering just how easy to parse an icon is at small size.
http://google.github.io/material-design-icons/