Geschichte des Einstellungen Symbols
Is it any wonder this is one of our most
popular downloads? You’ve got
no idea what kind of fan
mail the Settings Icon gets.
Three more bags of letters came today alone. It’s a real problem. Joanne from accounting tripped over one and chipped a
tooth.
_____________________________________________________
Why are settings icons look how they look?
When you need to fix or configure something in your gadget, chances are you are looking for a gear or a wrench icon.
It doesn’t even matter if it’s in your:
— phone
— laptop
— microwave
It’s a variation of one of these:

But have you ever thought why settings icons look how we got used to see them?
A gear for settings icon is a metaphor, but it goes from here — when you want to change how something works usually you supposed to emend inside parts that include gears, or sometimes alter it with a wrench.
Gears
Perhaps, it could be traced even further than that, but one of the pioneers in software field in this case was Windows 95. Maybe you still remember that icon.

And now we have different variants of settings icon which are more likely to be gears.
Wrench
It was much harder to find a UI with a wrench in it, which means that wrench icon is not that popular, and, perhaps, was adopted as an “original” modification to gears.
Variations of settings icons
A whole bunch of variations were developed throughout a time for Settings icon, you’ll easily find by which ancestors they were influenced:
