It is strange to me how the author praises the aesthetics of the original designs and then goes on to produce such an ugly set of symbols
Laundry symbols make no sense
11–20 of 237 posts
Re: Laundry symbols make no sense
#12Within a second of seeing the 'improved' ones I spot what is, to my mind at least, an immediate failure - the detail resolution is far too small. It doesn't account for the printing limitations on small fabric tags, never mind the ability of old fogeys such as myself to be able to squint that hard and actually read them. I have no idea even looking on my screen here what the difference between the first three is supp…
I think they are a lot more intuitive than the old ones, but I'd need to look up some stuff. I don't know what's the difference between normal, perm press and delicate for example. Or why the 3 knobs on the washing machine should represent it
The flask for bleach, and the drying symbols are much clearer though.
The detail in some is a bit too high for some clothing tags, I'd agree on that.
Re: Laundry symbols make no sense
#13Huh. I'm not the one doing laundry in our household, and I still know all the four symbols that were hand-drawn on the paper there.
To remember that the circle is dry cleaning it helps to know that it can circumscribe letters indicating what type of dry cleaning process is allowed.
The tumble dry symbol just looks like a tumble dryer, and the washing symbol the same. Bleach is the tricky one but can be remembered because it's not one of the others.
Re: Laundry symbols make no sense
#14Speaking of bad design, who thought it was a good idea to blink the labels in the animation, immediately after saying half of people asked knew none of the symbols?
Here are the frames with text: https://imgur.com/a/cP52BPP
Re: Laundry symbols make no sense
#15The difference between their “Mild drying process” and “normal drying process” is nearly impossible to perceive on a screen with the only difference being a few extra pixels on a thermometer. Pretty important to understand the difference between those if you like clothes that fit.
I wonder why they felt it necessary to keep everything as a single icon? Wouldn’t be as impossible to print/stitch or read if the icons were larger nouns + modifiers.
Re: Laundry symbols make no sense
#16> Laundry symbols make no sense
So I redesigned them, with all due respect.
Another failed GUI designer. If it worked for so many years, a lot of people are familiar with them. Why repeat the Windows GUI experience ? I get that the first phones were slow and doing things in Java didn't help and recognizing that the GUI is crap would not help with market adoption, but let's not pretend that Material design or reinventing a GUI every two years is innovative.
Re: Laundry symbols make no sense
#17Within a second of seeing the 'improved' ones I spot what is, to my mind at least, an immediate failure - the detail resolution is far too small. It doesn't account for the printing limitations on small fabric tags, never mind the ability of old fogeys such as myself to be able to squint that hard and actually read them. I have no idea even looking on my screen here what the difference between the first three is supp…
They are way more recognizable. When I looked at the example label at the end I immediately knew what all those new symbols meant. I still didn’t know what the original ones meant on the left.
Re: Laundry symbols make no sense
#18To me the redesign shows how good the originals were.
Eg, in some cases the redesign uses the 'dots' motif for strength of effect, and yet in others it uses a 'thermometer'. Just inconsistent, and actually even less intuitive.
Re: Laundry symbols make no sense
#19> Laundry symbols make no sense So I redesigned them, with all due respect. Another failed GUI designer. If it worked for so many years, a lot of people are familiar with them. Why repeat the Windows GUI experience ? I get that the first phones were slow and doing things in Java didn't help and recognizing that the GUI is crap would not help with market adoption, but let's not pretend that Material design or reinvent…
> If it worked for so many years, a lot of people are familiar with them
The thesis is that they don't work, at all. I have to look them up every time because they are absolutely inscrutable today. Laundry symbols are rarely looked at for most folks, so they have to be maximally communicative. It's not good enough if the only people that know what they mean are those that deal with them constantly.
Re: Laundry symbols make no sense
#20The glass thermometer in 2022 seems a bit like using a 3.5" floppy disk as a save icon, and I don't think it would show up very well on a tiny clothing tag.