Icons, pictograms, or glorified rebuses?

I was talking with a friend about the definition of icons the other day, sparked by this blog post from Khoi Vinh. In this short post, Khoi shows his dissatisfaction with the way icon design has gone.

… the majority of commonly accepted and commercially functional icons in use today are visually literal — they represent objects or combinations of objects, even if they are intended to stand in for abstract concepts — and they’re almost exclusively dimensional.

By contrast, I like incredibly abstract and minimal graphical elements. For me, a simple, one-pixel straight line is practically a revival of the Rococo style. If I had my way, the only pictorial components of my design work would be the pictures: photographs or illustrations. Everything else would be simple and elementally native to the browser, or whatever other rendering mechanism I’m working with. Which is to say, you’d only ever see lines and boxes — and flat ones at that. No shading, please, and no three-dimensional modeling.

While this notion isn’t new, and the post isn’t new either, the ball really got rolling when I was overtalking it. I think everybody has a notion of what an icon is; a representation or pictogram to represent a certain feature or object of the software world. This could be an application, opening a new tab in your browser, or a folder on your hard drive.

In today’s world of the OS X Aqua and Vista aesthetic, this means giving icons a close-to-real-life (dimensional) appearance to conform to platform style. I can’t see how goblets of glossy liquid in the interface fit into this, but it’s clear the icons long since have headed to the photorealistic appearance we got accustomed to. However, this notion is countered the pictograms in the signage we all know from subways, airports, and other major public places, which Khoi advocates in his post. This offers the question of my blog post; “have we swerved too far from traditional pictograms to really define the (particularly, application) icons we use today as ‘icons’?”

Continue reading Icons, pictograms, or glorified rebuses?…

Monster Marketing

Great video of Wil Shipley’s presentation at the C4[1] conference in 2007. Wil Shipley’s the co-founder of Delicious Monster, which you may know for the media cataloguing application Delicious Library. Apart from being funny and very fun to watch, it’s an interesting presentation on hype, marketing, and making software.

Via Jon ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch.

My icon is bigger than yours.

Since my office walls are awfully empty, I decided to design one of my favorite Mac OS X icons by Apple at 2 by 2 meters. Although the Photoshop file got awfully big (the original is rendered, but I redid it in Photoshop), it works pretty well as a wallpaper. Making it took about a day and a half (I haven’t worked on it ‘full-time’, as I’ve got client work too) I’ll post new pictures in this post next Tuesday when I expect the print to be put up in the office.

For now, check out the wallpaper version preview at Flickr.

Yummy February.

Feast your eyes on some icons yet to come. I’m almost literally breaking my teeth on adding details and perfecting a new icon aesthetic. More updates on several interesting February developments soon (before the end of the month).