Comments on: Icons, pictograms, or glorified rebuses?

By: Matt Penrose

Matt Penrose — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:30:22 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this whilst reading, i am yet to read Khoi’s piece, but to me an icon or logo should serve a different purpose to a pictogram.

Pictograms convey information quickly, visually, and multi-linguistically. Take the airport signs above, they show a plane landing and taking off.

However and icon or logo is a piece of branding which should invoke the feel of something, along with it’s function or heritage. Just looking at my dock i still get confused whether i need a feather (photoshop), butterfly (in-design) or flower (illustrator)…as a student i cannot afford the hardware needed for CS3 but i know them well and they do look quite nice all lined up but still something a little more imaginative would have been nice.

thanks for such and interesting article, i’ll bookmark this blog for future referenece

By: Reinier

Reinier — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:02:17 +0000

Great post and comment guys! In my opinion today’s application icons serve both identification and branding purposes, whereas the classic pictogram (like Mijksenaar’s for Schiphol Airport shown above) excludes the branding function.

By: Gedeon Maheux

Gedeon Maheux — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:19:45 +0000

Nice piece Sebastiaan. I agree with you that Khoi's dream of a 100% pictogram world is both impractical and actually unwanted. The answer for this is more simple that you or he realize... the client.

Clients don't generally want their product's icons to be represented by abstract lines, shapes and symbols 90% of the time. For better or worse, thanks to the likes of Microsoft and Apple, they want shiny, realistic, highly literal images of every day objects. As icon designers, we can sometimes steer them in other directions, but as they say in the food industry "the customer is always right".

But this isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Sometimes a happy medium can be reached I think. Take on of my favorite icons we've done to date: Coda. The Coda icon is in fact a real-world object, that of a leaf. But that object bears no actual relation to the software functions of the program it represents. It is meant as a symbol of growth and creation of the underlying functions of Coda and I think it works well for exactly that reason. Also, it is visually simple and almost serves as one of Khoi's pictograms he speaks of. In my mind it is the essence of what an icon should be. A simple picture that represents something much more complex that the user can quickly and easily associate by sight.

Sitting in the OS X dock, once you know what it is, Coda is one of the most easily recognizable and quickly spotted icons anywhere. It's color, shape and rendering all contribute to this, and I give Panic heaps of credit for letting us go in this direction when we designed it. If all clients were as open to ideas as they were, computer desktops would be a much better place.