I thought about this a lot while designing my latest iPad app. On the one hand, icons make everything look beautiful and cohesive, and give you an almost intuit

I thought about this a lot while designing my latest iPad app. On the one hand, icons make everything look beautiful and cohesive, and give you an almost intuitive sense of the UI if done right. On the other hand, it's hard to convey the meaning of a complicated tool using an icon alone, and I hate guess-and-checking the meanings of icons in other apps. My solution was to keep unlabelled icons for the obvious UI elements (in my case, undo/redo, play/rewind/record, erase, and metronome) and add small text labels underneath the icons that referred to more complicated or unique actions. For visual coherence, the labeled icons were kept in their own section: http://i.imgur.com/EeLzlVH.png http://i.imgur.com/EeLzlVH.png So yeah, I think the article is spot on.