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This "nothing we can replace it with" sounded wrong to me, so I spent a moment trying to quickly draw on my tablet some possible alternate metaphors for many of
by drostie 14y ago
This "nothing we can replace it with" sounded wrong to me, so I spent a moment trying to quickly draw on my tablet some possible alternate metaphors for many of the things used in this article, and I came up with these:
http://drostie.org/icons.png http://drostie.org/icons.png
(Disclaimer: my ability to draw is very limited so this looks unintentionally minimalist, because my "boxes" are just squares.)
You could have some convention which says, say, "the present file is a sort of ball or rounded object, the filesystem is a box where we can put our balls, the clipboard is some sort of stack of stuff," and so forth. Phones could look more like mobiles do now, if you put them in a bit of perspective and gave them a keypad. Rather than using the page for a generic document, we have the ball for that purpose, so we use the page instead to indicate printing, since you're converting the ball into a piece of paper.
I think wrenches, magnifying glasses, and binoculars can stay as iconic things -- but since people now use magnifying glasses for "zoom" we should perhaps stabilize on binoculars for "search"/"find". (And come on, I'm not Sherlock Holmes. I'm not trying to find a clue, I'm trying to find last night's homework.)
Email is much trickier; if we don't keep using envelopes, I don't know how we would iconify that.
- falcojr 14y agoI like the look of those, but I did laugh when I saw the cell phone with an antenna on the top.
- drostie 14y agoI actually spent fifteen minutes or so going back and forth on that. My old cell phone had one, perhaps for style, yet my new phone doesn't. And I was thinking a lot about that bizarre V-shaped TV antenna, too. ^_^
- vacri 14y agoI like your general icons, but your phone is already obsolete. I'm also not sure why the last two represent real world devices rather than abstract concepts, given that your other icons are pretty intuitive.
- drostie 14y agoThere's a problem with "search" in particular because I just have too many ideas. Almost all of them suck. What's the most iconic image of search? Finding a needle in a haystack. Well, that won't do. Second most iconic image of search? Police searching a home. Looking for your keys. Rummaging couch cushions for change. Steal the Google logo. Some ideas of search are okay, but don't play well with the other icons -- a piece of paper with text, one of the lines suddenly jumps to a fragment of blue text. (It works if your "find" highlights a word with a blue box when it finds it.) The closest I have come to another good icon for search is to try to denote the question, "where is it?" This could be a question mark with the "box" which represents the filesystem. Perhaps many balls are shown coming out of the box. Or perhaps a stack of notecards with one of them being pulled out. "Call" is different because I have too few ideas. A phone, perhaps. Two faces seen in profile could mean "converse" with the implication that there will be voice. Or an ear, perhaps, with its oblong shape. Telephone wires are iconic in parts of the US, but are an oddity abroad. And beyond that, I'm a bit lost.
- kiri3l 14y agoAs an answer to your question regarding an icon for search. How about an eyeball? Searching is very much a visual process. Both binoculars and magnifying glass requires eyes to be useful in practice. Combining an eyeball with other icons doesn't feel impossible.
- tallpapab 14y agoNice. I particularly like your zooming icons.