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I bet when you see a red octagon, you just think of it as a thing on the side of the road that means "stop", don't you? But despite your not knowing its origin,
by sopooneo 10y ago
I bet when you see a red octagon, you just think of it as a thing on the side of the road that means "stop", don't you? But despite your not knowing its origin, not knowing why it means stop, it still works well right?
- sjwright 10y agoThat's an arbitrary, abstract shape. Combined with a near-universal colour association of red for stop/end/abort. It doesn't need an origin. If stop signs showed the picture of the brake lever from a Ford Model T, you'd have a point.
- emodendroket 10y agoYeah, but why are red/yellow/green "universal" colors for driving? I don't think it's because of some innate human love for those particular meanings of the colors. In fact, I'd bet that in a society without cars the red octagon would not be so "universally" understood to mean "stop."
- sjwright 10y agoBasic colour meanings of red and green transcend many genres of human existence, from business (using a red pen, or being "in the red") to entire gamuts of electronics and engineering, red warning stickers, etc. I agree that the octagon is arbitrary. But that's beside the point, because it's self-evidently arbitrary. Nobody assumes there must be a deeper meaning behind a basic shape. The iconography of a floppy disk is not a basic shape.
- spoondan 10y agoTo be honest, I don't know what point you're trying to make. It is as if you think I was claiming arbitrary symbols cannot work well as icons. But I actually said the opposite of that: the floppy disk is basically an arbitrary symbol at this point. It works because we train people what it means.