51–60 of 60 posts
Since we are on topic, anybody has a suggestion for an icon that represents body fat without representing an overweighted person?
The author has criticised the design of the "electric power steering system warning light" icon without suggesting a better alternative. What's the point of criticizing then? Some concepts are easier to depict literally, others are not. The most important part about the car icons is the color: an orange icon means you can go, a red icon means you must immediately stop.
There are lots of ways to do it. You could just include a page in the manual: "These icons indicate emergencies. Those other icons are just warnings," and expect color-blind users to memorize it. It's not optimal, but it's better than nothing.
Emergency icons might be larger, or perhaps flash (gently). You could include a octagonal stop-sign border around icons that indicate emergencies.
Using color as an additional channel for the 90+% of people in the world who can see it. But the remaining set (over 10% of men) are a sizeable audience.
Off-topic question: I see a lot of new posts coming from .cc websites. What is the appeal that .cc provides? Is it that the content is released under Creative Commons? That's not the case here. What kind of messaging or symbolism or underlying meaning one is aiming for when they are going for a .cc domain?
Why .cc? I guess because it's familiar-ish. It's easy to hit the "c" twice, and "c" is the first letter of "com".
In this case, uxdesign.com refers to a blog that has lain fallow for a decade. It does no harm sitting there, and it may as well as long as its owner remembers to pay the trivial sum to renew it. But "uxdesign" might as well get new life in some other TLD.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The play button points at the direction the tape will roll in your cassette player. It had a very practical function once upon a time.
Wow, I completely forgot about that fact. So the play triangle was an arrow saying "tape is rolling in this direction" and fast-forward and reverse double triangles were "tape is rolling fast" in the respective directions. Did these buttons first show up on cassette players? The reel-to-reels I can think of had multi-position switches.
This machine is apparently from 1961, so it must have been quite early in the 60s: http://www.reelprosoundguys.com/images/1962_GRUNDIG_TK_46.jp...
If I could lodge a complaint to all the UI designers: please stop making all the icons look the same in order for them to have the same "style." If I'm looking at a grid of essentially identical white-on-black pictograms with overlapping forms composed entirely of outlines with no variation in thickness or stroke, then you might as well just use actual words at that point.
Most of the time text would be more useful than iconography. Even when you don't understand the language, text and iconography are about the same - some squiggly lines that mean nothing, that you have to attach meaning to.
Since we are on topic, anybody has a suggestion for an icon that represents body fat without representing an overweighted person?
The Noun Project has a few options that might work (most don't meet your requirements), including a couple showing a lean person with arrows by the midsection instead: https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=body%20fat
In the 10+ years I've been running a UI/UX design firm for software companies, I've come to the conclusion that icon design, is not very different from logo design and brand design. A Nike swish logo by itself, without context of the brand we have with it today, is just a random piece of graphic. The pixels itself are worth practically nothing. But because when we see the Nike logo, we feel something (Athleticism, mo…
The play button points at the direction the tape will roll in your cassette player. It had a very practical function once upon a time.
If I could lodge a complaint to all the UI designers: please stop making all the icons look the same in order for them to have the same "style." If I'm looking at a grid of essentially identical white-on-black pictograms with overlapping forms composed entirely of outlines with no variation in thickness or stroke, then you might as well just use actual words at that point.
As a general rule icons take up less horizontal space than actual words describing what they do, which is why designers prefer to use icons.
