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List:       mozilla-ui
Subject:    icons
From:       joe <joe () camel ! com>
Date:       2002-11-12 0:55:26
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Do not base icons off word puns. This should be avoided for a couple 
reasons, the most obvious of which is that puns do not translate well. 
For example, representing the "system log monitor" as a log will likely 
be uncommunicative in languages other than English. Additionally, most 
users do not comprehend the word play until it is too late for the icon 
to assist them. Even after being familiar with the "system log monitor" 
being represented as a log, users do not form the association fast 
enough for the icon to assist through in scanning through menu entries. 
A popular instance of this problem was the proliferation of icons 
representing the "World Wide Web" as a spider web in the mid 1990s. Part 
of the value of icons is that they bypass linguistic comprehension and 
hence are complementary to captions, allowing users to utilize more 
areas of the mind than linguistic recognition (already used in scanning 
for captions) when they hunt for


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