61–70 of 147 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "floppy disk" always (even with 5.25" and 8" disks) referred to the disk inside the casing, not the casing (which wasn't particularly floppy on the bigger disks, and wasn't a disk on any of them.)
I always thought it came from the fact that the old 8-inchers were physically flexible.
searched for "save" .. ten pages of variations on the 3.5" diskette icon all labeled "floppy" even though diskettes aren't floppy. I wonder when a new save icon will emerge?
The paradigm of "saving" is going away. In "new" apps this can hardly be found. Users expect that all stuff is saved automatically all the time. Files and such are a legacy from the old desktop world.
I read some designers discussing the filter icon usually being a funnel which doesn't do much filtering. It does funnel something into something. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=filter interesting to see the other options that show up.
Here's an idea; four arrows moving right, towards a line. The line has a hole in it, only allowing one of the arrows to pass through. Demonstrates filtering and doesn't have any accidental significance from symmetry.
There's also a literal filter icon, which could only ever work at somewhat larger sizes due to the mesh. Without knowing that the context of the search results is that of "filter", however, you probably wouldn't know what it was by simply looking at it.
I put up a couple of hundred icons that I'd drawn previously up with a public domain license. Here are the download counts and royalties from the last 10 months for reference: http://i.imgur.com/clNZWUk.png
Little pictograms for buttons are often extremely vague and open to interpretation. Eg. Heres a random game where upon opening it I was immediately confused http://mobile.cdn.softpedia.com/apk/images/color-switch_1.jp... (also the icons are all animated / rotating, making it even more confusing, made this game menu stick out in my memory as an egregious example) Some designers seems to love the minimalism of if thoug…
That really depends. Can you imagine photoshop's interface if it were all text? This is an extreme example but more generally I think text is better for discoverability but icons are better for visual memory and thus better suited for buttons in applications you use often. On desktop there are always tool tips. On touch interfaces this was not yet figured out.
http://justinvincent.com/page/2387/if-the-iphone-used-text-l...
It shows just how stark an interface can look without them.
Little pictograms for buttons are often extremely vague and open to interpretation. Eg. Heres a random game where upon opening it I was immediately confused http://mobile.cdn.softpedia.com/apk/images/color-switch_1.jp... (also the icons are all animated / rotating, making it even more confusing, made this game menu stick out in my memory as an egregious example) Some designers seems to love the minimalism of if thoug…
Related: US traffic signs always bothered me because we have trained users who need to be able to identify the traffic signs as quickly as possible so that they can focus on the road. Yet we use traffic signs that are optimized for the opposite use case. Europe and most other countries are way ahead on that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That really depends. Can you imagine photoshop's interface if it were all text? This is an extreme example but more generally I think text is better for discoverability but icons are better for visual memory and thus better suited for buttons in applications you use often. On desktop there are always tool tips. On touch interfaces this was not yet figured out.
I did a workup of the iphone with no icons and just text: http://justinvincent.com/page/2387/if-the-iphone-used-text-l... It shows just how stark an interface can look without them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying creating and sharing icon sets is not a get-rich-quick-scheme? ;)
Ah the halcyon days of September last year when I made nearly $40. Still, it's free beer money, and a good enough way to distribute work to the public domain. It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community.
You would be surprised how helpful it is to simply offer design insights for free. A lot of projects are maintainted by programmers who have zero design notions and who are not even aware of the little things.
Offering a free mockup to an open-source project is also very valuable.
Little pictograms for buttons are often extremely vague and open to interpretation. Eg. Heres a random game where upon opening it I was immediately confused http://mobile.cdn.softpedia.com/apk/images/color-switch_1.jp... (also the icons are all animated / rotating, making it even more confusing, made this game menu stick out in my memory as an egregious example) Some designers seems to love the minimalism of if thoug…
Here here!
When I use a new bit of software one of my first acts is to try to change all the 'friendly' icons to text only.