Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the rule of thumb is that: if the pictogram is always same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it. One of first programs that put pictograms in menus was Microsoft Word. But the way Word did it was entirely different from what we do now. Microsoft Word had toolbars and their buttons, of course, were mostly pictorial. Toolbars could be turned on and off and users…
> thus is decorative. Discard it. Or keep it since decoration makes interfaces feel more alive. Not everything NEEDS to be useful
Menus should not feel alive. Because they are menus, at any given point they mostly contain things the user does not want to interact with right now. Menu icons that serve as visual anchors are good, they help the task of finding the desired action, as well as building a visual memory. Icons everywhere achieve the opposite, for the spurious benefit of visual consistency. Menu items are not consistent affordances, they perform very different actions that are at best related, but oftentimes they are there because they need to be somewhere.
