Icons save space. Icons look sharp. Icons give quick answers to hard questions: just how do we allow it to be nicer? How do we brand it? Just how do we ensure it is more pleasurable? We ♥ icons. Until they begin messing with this minds.

Icon or no Icon?

Icons are available in 666 tastes. Icons on items, in architecture, in computer systems, in listings, on buttons, for the internet as well as for apps, for iOS and Android os. Icons on toolbars, unlabelled and labelled, styled and standardised, colored or monochrome, in fonts, PNGs or as SVGs…

You will find loads of free and compensated symbol collections, vector and pixel, 2D and 3D, and with them all you’d need to write a big icon cookbook if you want to write rules on how to deal. There are plenty damn icons that the devil might fool you into resolving most of the world’s design issues using them.

Be careful though: If you answer every design concern with “Icon!”, 1 day Don Norman may knock in your home and, whenever you open it, he can look deeply into the eyes and state:

Inscrutable icons litter the facial skin for the products although the research community has very long demonstrated that folks cannot recall the meaning of significantly more than a small wide range of icons […] who are able to keep in mind exactly what each symbol means? Perhaps not me personally. 1

In cases like this, Don Norman is lecturing their employer that is former Apple. Some outstanding samples of Apple’s iconitis are available in iTunes, Mail while the iOS dashboard. Continue reading →