icons are symbolic representations. They may have started out as representations of physical object but they can become abstracted become conventions. The save

icons are symbolic representations. They may have started out as representations of physical object but they can become abstracted become conventions. The save icon may have started as an image of a physical disk/disc but by convention it has moved into an abstraction for storing changes. Taken to an extreme icons can morph from hieroglyphic symbols to alphabetic characters to the point where it can be hard to see what the original object modeled was.