Icon's are the written language of the digital world.
Noun Project – Icons for Everything
121–130 of 147 posts
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#122Don't submit them to the Unicode Consortium. Please. Do not want.
There are now over 2600 emoji. Enough already.
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Suppose I see a squiggle on some program. Where do I go to look up its meaning? I can't even type it in. It's either one of the well known vocabulary of icons used across programs (e.g. floppy disk for save, house for "home", x for delete, etc), or a new one you can just hover over and read what it does in the tooltip. After the first time (or couple of times), you don't need to read that again, and you'll recogniz…
Tooltips aren't always used. A further complication is that people tend to copyright icons, so the icons from one app to the next are substantially different. > x for delete I've seen 'x', 'delete', 'del', and the trash can. 'x' is also used to cancel or close. There's little consistency.
"Tooltips aren't always used."
Some people have implemented icons poorly, so we shouldn't use icons, isn't a compelling argument. Those people might implement anything badly, for instance choosing bad text in a text-based approach.
Agreed re: consistency -- good icon design requires understanding what people expect and matching it, which isn't always easy (as the referenced project demonstrates!)
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#124I 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.
Funnels are used for filtering all the time, think coffee, lab equipment, etc. The parameters of the filter - i.e the mesh - are what you are choosing to go in the funnel.
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Icons and text are exactly the same thing. They're both language; visual forms that mean something. We're more used to text, because text has a lot of nice properties as a medium for language so it has become pervasive. It's generally low dimensional and has high composability. For low bandwidth mediums it's ideal, because it's also low bandwidth. But that doesn't mean icons aren't a language and aren't just as usefu…
"Icons and text are exactly the same thing." Nope. Icons are direct visual analogs of the things represented. There's just one layer of abstraction: thing -> picture of thing. An icon, at least in principle, looks like the thing represented (or at least like some important property of it). That's feasible for "save" or "center the text", but starts to get pretty damned hard when it's something like "Earl Warren's opi…
> Icons are direct visual analogs of the things represented.
Counter example: The universal icon for "play", as in to play a movie, is a right facing arrow. It is not a visual analog of anything, since playing a movie is an entirely abstract concept.
The same is true of rewind, pause, and most other controls on a VCR.
Having two icons next to each other, one that looks like a "+" and the other that looks like a "-" indicates a set of controls for increasing and decreasing. Again, these are icons that are not visual analogs of anything; they're entirely abstract.
The fact that a lot of icons are visual analogs is merely for convenience sake. Having a button that looks like an open door helps communicate to people, who've never been taught what that icon means, that this is probably a button that opens a door. That's more convenient than having to educate all users that a completely arbitrary symbol means "open a door".
But, as I mentioned with the VCR control examples, if the thing you're trying to represent doesn't have a visual analog at all, then you just have to design something arbitrary and explain it to people until it becomes common language. Much like a heart symbol.
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Icons and text are exactly the same thing. They're both language; visual forms that mean something. We're more used to text, because text has a lot of nice properties as a medium for language so it has become pervasive. It's generally low dimensional and has high composability. For low bandwidth mediums it's ideal, because it's also low bandwidth. But that doesn't mean icons aren't a language and aren't just as usefu…
"Icons and text are exactly the same thing." Nope. Icons are direct visual analogs of the things represented. There's just one layer of abstraction: thing -> picture of thing. An icon, at least in principle, looks like the thing represented (or at least like some important property of it). That's feasible for "save" or "center the text", but starts to get pretty damned hard when it's something like "Earl Warren's opi…
What is the "thing" that directly represents save? A floppy disk?
Yeah no abstraction there. Moron.
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#127Don't submit them to the Unicode Consortium. Please. Do not want. There are now over 2600 emoji. Enough already.
The point of modern emoji is that their look is standardized though. (past the original goal of Japanese cell phone communication, the consortium seems to be concerned with filling in gaps and making sure cultures are properly represented) So emoji should (ideally) be a common set of pictograms that people can send to each other and which can be displayed interchangeable by each IME. The Unicode Consortium also has more stringent standards for inclusion. [0] UI icons are excluded. 2.6K isn't a lot, [1] Unicode has tons of room, and no one is forcing you to use them. People have obviously found use for them and it has made them enthusiastic about interacting with their tech overlords. [2] I used to irrationally hate anything popular too, until I made an effort to try to understands people's motivations for liking it and tried it myself. Emoji are the missing expressive layer of our text that express nuance like sarcasm and mirth. Sure we have emoticons, but those were limited and emoji are much more diverse and versatile. [3] Maybe you should give them a try before being so quick to write them off. I don't exactly pepper my texts with them, but I do respect people's motivations for using them and I always make sure to send a popper [4] to my friends on their birthdays.
[0]: http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html
[1]: Just look at how many Chinese characters there are...
[2]: Campaigns to get certain emoji into unicode are quite popular, such as with the taco emoji (https://www.tacobell.com/feed/tacoemoji) and the dumping emoji (http://www.dumplingemoji.org/).
[3]: Eggplant emoji anyone?
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#128I 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
Damn. I always purchase the icons, that's really peak that others don't do the same.
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#129Earlier 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.
Wow, great comparison. It's seems as if icons make a lot of sense in places that are used constantly (like the iOS screen)
Re: Noun Project – Icons for Everything
#130No masturbate icon. Downvoted