How did the PureOS Store icon come to be a shopping bag with a button on it?

Software PureOS
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I find it odd that the PureOS Store icon is a shopping bag with a picture of a button on it.

For illustration, the PureOS Store icon: a representation of a shopping bag with a circular button on it. The button has four circular holes in the middle.
This is not a criticism, per se; just an expression of mild puzzlement. Can anyone explain how this came about?

A haberdashery shop is not the first kind of shop I would have thought of drawing an analogy with in order to illustrate the concept of “app store”; I probably would have gone for some kind of tool shop or DIY store.

But, then again, apps are not necessarily tools. Sometimes they serve a decorative or not purely utilitarian purpose, or they are materials for building a larger whole, in which case haberdashery works rather well as an analogy. But art and design materials, as seen in RISC OS and Mac OS, probably have closer equivalents in the realm of software. Sewing materials seem strangely specific.

For illustration, the RISC OS 3.00 Apps folder icon: a low-resolution pixel-art representation of a pale yellow paper folder overlaid with a green pencil, a red-handled paintbrush and a blue pen. For illustration, the Mac OS X 10.1 Applications icon: a skeuomorphic, realistic representation of a wood-coloured ruler overlaid by a yellow pencil with an eraser at the unsharpened end and a red-handled paintbrush. The three items are arranged so that they roughly form the shape of a capital letter A.

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I agree that it looks like a button. But I don’t think that it’s supposed to be one.
Looks more like a stylized group (i.e. subdirectory) of apps to me.

Here’s a variant of the icon that seems to support the app-group theory: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/gnome-software/-/blob/librem5-3-34-0/data/icons/hicolor/scalable/org.gnome.Software.svg

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Ahh, maybe that’s it. Considering it in that light, it reminds me a bit of the applications icon(s) used by Nokia.
Illustration: one version of the Nokia applications icon. Four square blocks arranged in a square, with the top left one raised out of the block, as if being added to produce the whole. In this version, the blocks are rendered in three dimensions, with a blue front face and a white border with rounded corners which is set back from the face slightly and extruded rearwards to form the white sides. Illustration: another version of the Nokia applications icon. It still has the four square blocks arranged in a square with the top left block slightly offset as if being added or removed, but this version is a more two-dimensional rendering, with the top left block in blue and the others in grey.

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If I recall correctly, puri.sm is still looking for a Marketing DIrector. When they hire one perhaps artistic minimalism will be changed?

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Wouldn’t hiring more people likely make the phone even more expensive than it already is?

I’m sure Purism would happily accept merge requests from the community for review though.

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If the advert for a Marketing person is already out, it is already in the budget including Dept. expenditures. No gain or loss. Considering that, there is probably unspent money in that subledger.

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Wish they transferred that budget to the phone-shipping, camera-fixing, and suspend-supporting subledgers though.

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Raiding unspent budgets is not unheard of. All it takes is an internal memo. But it would propbably be a pittance of overall operations. Otherwise I agree. (Marketing budgets also include an allowance for SWAG, which is probably why there isn’t much out there.)

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