Icon design

java-programmer, Icon design On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 20:00:28 GMT, The Ghost In The Machine
<email***@***.com> wrote or quoted :

>Firefox has a fox circling the world
>but is visually slightly confusing, at least to me.

the small Firefox icon looks like a curled salamander.

Icon design is something I am battling on the current project I'm on.
I'm by far the oldest, and I like icons that are simple and
distinctive without a lot of fussy detail. I don't care if they are
abstract. I can learn what they mean with the hoverhelp and use even
peripheral vision to find them. The others are young. They like "cool"
icons that are highly representational. Yet to me, the icons all look
like complicated little miniature paintings. You can't tell what they
mean without squinting at them. I keep hitting the wrong one. The
product is aimed at grandmothers, but I think the others imagine
grandmothers are doddering and need the more literal icons rather than
having poor eyesight.

I would really like it if icons were configurable in all programs so
that if the authors make icons that all look alike to me, e.g. Funduc
Search/replace, I could fix them. The Opera people seem to have that
down to a science. I wish other companies would follow suit.

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/opera.html

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.

java-programmer >> Icon design In comp.lang.java.advocacy, Roedy Green
<email***@***.com>
wrote
on Fri, 23 Jul 2004 20:28:09 GMT
<email***@***.com>:
> On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 20:00:28 GMT, The Ghost In The Machine
> <email***@***.com> wrote or quoted :
>
>>Firefox has a fox circling the world
>>but is visually slightly confusing, at least to me.
>
> the small Firefox icon looks like a curled salamander.
>
> Icon design is something I am battling on the current project I'm on.
> I'm by far the oldest, and I like icons that are simple and
> distinctive without a lot of fussy detail. I don't care if they are
> abstract. I can learn what they mean with the hoverhelp and use even
> peripheral vision to find them. The others are young. They like "cool"
> icons that are highly representational. Yet to me, the icons all look
> like complicated little miniature paintings. You can't tell what they
> mean without squinting at them. I keep hitting the wrong one. The
> product is aimed at grandmothers, but I think the others imagine
> grandmothers are doddering and need the more literal icons rather than
> having poor eyesight.
>
> I would really like it if icons were configurable in all programs so
> that if the authors make icons that all look alike to me, e.g. Funduc
> Search/replace, I could fix them. The Opera people seem to have that
> down to a science. I wish other companies would follow suit.
>
> see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/opera.html
>

Not sure about Opera (I don't use it), but I'll admit
that icons are difficult to design well, especially when
squished to a 16x16 representation.

<mode value="reminiscence">

Ah, Athena. The buttons therein may by default look like crap.
However, one can spice up that crap with a .pixmap (IIRC) declaration,
and thereby change a button that looks like text with a black border
around it to an icon that makes sense. Or the text could be
changed; if one doesn't like "Open" one can change it to "Offen"
(I think that's the German) or "Ouvrir" or "Enable Access To Document"
if one really likes long-winded.

</mode>

To be fair, Gtk and Qt now offer either text, icons, or text+icons.
I don't know about internationalization, but ideally the user would
be able to specify in a side file the text and icons he wants.
(Athena had a number of side files, variously positioned.)

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