I forget whether it's cool or not this week.
I hate skeuomorphism when it's used wantonly, beyond the purpose of communicating how the UI works. Like that first version of the Apple Podcasts app that had a reel-to-reel animation¹, for example.
But icons... it's like the definition of the term.
> I forget whether it's cool or not this week.
I think it might be trending upward again. We all hated it in 2012, then the pendulum swung so far toward "flat design" that I (we?) would love to have too much of it again, if the alternative is not enough of it.
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/atmasphere/8320805931/
EDIT: Just thought about it some more and realized some icons are good abstractions of a non-physical thing. Play, Pause, and the rest of audio controls, for example. And of course Back and Refresh are just arrows.
But for something like "settings", or "info", you're going to have to draw some sort of picture for that. Gears and lists of sliders are two already-recognizable things that people know means "guts of the machine" and "control console panel thing".
The download/,upload ones. For extra points, they're also an English-specific visual pun. I can't think of a language-neutral version, though, unfortunately.
(Was also going to mention play/pause/stop, power, and standby, but you edited those in already. Still throwing this out there in case anyone knows a solution to the download problem.)
