RE: Icon Love

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Sharpen your knives, everybody-- I'm about to make myself hideously
unpopular (again) by criticising tigert and jimmac's wonderful icons :o)

I can't fault the vast majority of them, it's a pretty awesome effort. 
There are just a few that I have some question marks over from a
usability point of view, though.  Some of my fears may be unfounded, but
I've just written down the initial reaction that came into my head when
I first saw them.

(I wanted to run them through the color-blindness simulator at
www.vischeck.com too, but it didn't like the webpage for some reason. 
The simulator is available on the site as a Photoshop plugin as well,
though, so maybe somebody with Photoshop and a bit of time could check
them out to see how clear they look to a color blind person.)

---

Save/Export: Not a criticism of these particular icons, but I wish
somebody would come up with a Save icon that doesn't include a floppy
disk!  Fewer and fewer people need to use floppies these days, and most
things they ever save will never go anywhere near one... there are
probably kids using computers in schools these days who have never even
seen a real floppy disk.

Import: Not sure the cogwheel means a lot to me, but okay, I'll buy
it...

Cut & Paste: A little too similar to each other for my liking... maybe
if the arrows more clearly pointed into and out of the clipboard, it
might help, but to me it just looks like they're pointing "up" and
"down", which doesn't really communicate much.

Spellcheck: The checkmark in the large version could maybe look more
like a checkmark, the down and up strokes are almost the same length
making it look more like a "V" at the moment.

Help: Hmm, okay, I wasn't expecting that!  I guess it works, I just
wonder if it will confuse people who are used the the ubiquitous
question mark.  I expect they'll soon get used to it though.

About: Have no idea what the stars are supposed to represent, but it's
distinctive enough that people will probably learn it pretty quickly.

Bold, Italic, Underline, Font, Sort: I think we've covered these
elsewhere :)

Text justify: Agree with someone's earlier comment about the river in
the large version, it's a little distracting.

Delete:  I think I mentioned this on IRC a while ago... IMHO the
"Trashcan" icon is best kept for deleting 'objects' that you can recover
again later from the trash-- it doesn't really make sense for deleting
text in a text editor, for example.  Seeing it on a toolbar in an app
that doesn't feature a 'real' trashcan could cause confusion with those
apps like Nautilus that do.  I'd prefer to see something more like the
Micro$**t "red X" for delete, but I know we use that for Close/Cancel,
so that would have to change too :/

Insert Table: Seems to be inconsistent with the other "Insert..." icons,
why doesn't it show a table being inserted into a document?

Line in:  I thought this was two wee men standing beside each other :) 
Not really sure how you'd improve this one, perhaps have just the one
jack plug with the cable part made a bit "wavier" so it looks more like
a cable?

Volume: I thought this was a bicycle lamp at first!  I'd be tempted to
make the large icon look more like the small version.

Application/vnd.ms: Does this appear for all Excel files, or just XLS
files?  I guess it could be a little confusing if an XLW file had an
icon with "XLS" written on it.  (Same goes for the other icons that fall
into this category, e.g. PowerPoint files might be .POT or .PPS rather
than .PPT)

Application/qif: Maybe we should localize this one as well :)

Application/x-cc-source: Yes, I know it's kinda cool, but the pizza
allusion is kind of an American cultural thing, and cultural things
don't really make good universal icons...

Application/x-e-theme:  What on earth *is* that thing in the box...?  
Pacman on a bad hair day...?  :)

Application/x-staroffice:  We might want an extra icon for the
forthcoming StarOffice 6.0 XML format (.SXW)... not sure what the MIME
type for that is off the top of my head, though.

Application/x-jar:  This falls into the category of "visual pun", which
is something else that won't travel well.  Unfortunately the standard
JLF icons make use of the same pun, but that fact may be enough for us
to get away with it...

text/x-credits: Ah, okay, now I see what the stars on the "about" icon
are all about!  (But weren't we trying to move away from an about box
being a list of credits, and more towards a description of what the
application actually does?)

Video/Mpeg|quicktime: I lost a shirt button yesterday that looks exactly
like that :)  I'm afraid it doesn't really look like a reel of film to
me.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems