Slashdot Mirror
Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate)
bughunter writes "One of today's Yahoo Daily Picks is the personal exhibit of Susan Kare: the mimimalist creator of most of the original Macintosh icons then, later, the iconic elements for Windows 3.0, and she didn't stop there. More than just icons, her GUI elements have become part of the modern collective subconscious - trashcans, bombs, and Happy Macs are universally recognized by computer literate persons the world over. (I can personally attest that the Mac System 6 beachball is burned into my soul...) She deserves some recognition of her own."
See subject.
as the image server is already /.'ed
Zero comments and already /.'d.
BTW, many of those icons are recognizeable even by computer-illiterate people too.
It was working a few minutes ago when it was in The Mysterious Future. Quickist slashdotting I've ever seen for a site with no large downloads.
I too am a mimimalist and must contact her, I thought I was the only one.
This was /. before it even went live. Here is the google cache but it won't let you see the pretty icons.
I'm actually wearing a Susan Kare t-shirt right now.
The one with the bomb icon on it.
I don't wear it at airports.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
it isn't burned into your soul, because it isn't a beachball, it's a watch. The minute hand turns.
Dork.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Slashdotted without a comment in sight!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
On the part of the site that was working, the pixel fonts reminded me of a time I tried to make Microsoft Word have the look of the old DOS Wordperfect. I managed to make the background blue, though it was really bright, and I managed to make the text gray. But I couldn't find the right monospaced, pixelly font. Has anybody else tried to do this, or am I just psycho? I thought that Wordperfect was much more fun to write in. I always felt like Doogie Howser.
(Also, for a supposed icon expert, how come the portfolio icon doesn't really evoke portfolio so much as "person writing"?)
...the icon I'm staring at trying to look at this already-slashdotted page? Did she make this one too?
If you click the Windows 3.0 icons you get an error. Its so cool that she managed to emulate windows on her web page :)
/.ing has died down I think it will really be worth a look even for a retro kick. She designed the solitare cards for God's sake. How many hours of my life has that accounted for? :)
Seriously though when the
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I'm kind of curious how a beach ball is representative of busyness or waiting. Plz explain.
I remember when I owned my Amiga there was a person who created an application called Magic icons. It changed the way the Amiga's desktop looked and for the most part a large number of Amiga users defaulted to using that application.
Her server resources were even more minimalist than her icons...
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
bandwidth, and a misconfigured apache install.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I gotta say that cute icons make a difference. I hate the crappy ones that most software use. Designing an icon that is distinctive and has an obvious functional message at 20 * 20 pixels (or whatever) takes a certain kind of talent.
I remember the happy mac startup icon from 1984... when the Mac was happy, *I* was happy. When the Mac had a twisted mouth and Xs for eyes, I wasn't.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
...So much so that we do not even need to see the article.
I'd never really thought of icon creators as artists before, but I suppose they deserve recognition with the more familiar artists.
Just think: together with the "NBC Peacock" guy and a handful of other logo creators, Susan Kare's "art" has probably been viewed and used my more people, for more hours, than any conventional artistic works in human history... and all in the space of two short decades.
I'll never forget the first time I saw the "sad Mac" icon during bootup. It made me chuckle and would have been even more amusing had it not been for the fact that my system would no longer boot.
I stopped using macs soon after that.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
She also worked on some of the icons at Eazel (she did the first Nautilus vector theme) and some of the fonts for Danger (who make the hiptop/sidekick).
I wonder what an icon would look like if you wanted it to say "Oh shit, I've been
I remember in the days of Windows 3, there was a dll icon file that was about 300KB ... and scrolling through it on a 386 SX took about 10 minutes! Can't remember it's name though.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
If you just search for Susan Kare using Google Images, you'll find quite a few examples.
Karma whoring mode ON:
Google Cache Links:
iconic elements for Windows 3.0 [Google Cache Link]
original Macintosh icons [Google Cache Link]
kare's portoflio shows to her credit:
mac paint,
macintosh icons
macintosh fonts (like classic chicago!)
windows 3.0 icons
windows solitare
os/2 warp icons
7 pixel fonts
her site is getting hammered already. the coolest part of susan kare is she had no template for the creation of her art. she gave form to predesigned functions. she's sorta like a Jonathan Ive way back when.
Good. So instead of just /.ing her, we do it on a day when the site's address has just been emailed out to thousands of link-starved people too.
Script Kiddies wish they had that much power.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The happy mac icon is shown during boot as long as things still are going OK. When it changes into a sad mac, it has apparently encountered some problem.
Does it return a sad webserver icon?
Oh well, I guess owning a Mac makes you some sort of IT hero around slashdot. You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about.
Well around here I don't know of ANY IT guys that know any of that. Here IT guys usually refers to the systems support guys (you know, the ones that maintain the network, sets up computers, gives you flack for installing non standard software, etc). The stuff you mention usually is the domain of the developers (or engineers if you prefer).
BTW, the Happy Mac was the icon you saw when your Mac passed all it's boot checks and was booting "normally" (vs the Sad Mac which you saw if your machine was hosed).
is an icon of an old single unit Macintosh computer with a smiley face showing on the screen. But why take my word for it when a picture is worth a thousand words
Well that is indeed hardware troubleshooting of the highest order! See a frowny face, pay tech support.
Computer literate indeed!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
They should put a bomb icon on their web site to reflect their /.ing.
Miko O'Sullivan
So is she retired or in a different field or just not getting called on by the companies anymore?
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
This would make sense if people pattern matched to words but they don't. Take a group of people and allow them to press a button corresponding to a meaning and then show them pictures. Then do the same with words, the picture responses will be *much* faster. We are visual creatures.
--- I do not moderate.
And you bitch about Mac elitism? Listen to yourself dude.
/. think back to the old macs they owned or used in school.
"I've never used a mac except for a few times in passing, blah blah, it's only for the computer illiterate, blah blah, I obviously know everything about computers because I know a couple coding techniques so I'm right and you're wrong, blah blah blah"
I'm sorry that you didn't feel included when the editor said that computer literate people know the Happy Mac icon, but damn, lay off the hostility...there's no need to call for jihad. If you don't like macs and never have, good for you, that's your choice. If you can reminesce about your Commodore PET, then let the other 95% of the people on
As far as arrogance derived from coding or system administration skill goes, it is unfounded. You're not cool and you're not making a difference. Any reasonably intelligent person can perform these tasks given the time and desire. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.
Now hopefully we'll both be modded down as trolls and we can go on with our lives.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
It also gave a diagnostic code. How is this any different than some cryptic bios failure code from days gone by in the pc world (or count the led flashes on many unix boxen, or lookup the error code on the led on IBM boxen)? Maybe not as cutsey, but hey, Macs are in graphics mode ALL the time so you could do "fancy" stuff like that even way back then. Seems to me you're the only "elitest" around here.
Coming from someone decrying elitism, that is about the most elitist post I could think of.
Some of the best icons ever created were by Keith Ohlfs for NeXTstep. Amazing what he could pack into 64x64 2-bit greyscale pixels.
Check out his latest work at Pixelsight
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Hashing a with buckets makes out of a Happy Mac a collection of groups of Not So Happy Mac parts of similar size, but of unrelated use.
A B-Tree is stuffing a lot of Happy Macs to a lot of 'X's, so you can smash them faster because of their physical nearness. But keep them in countable pile, so you don't lost track of them.
A two-handed clock algorithm is a attempt at stopping a clock with both hands, which bears the problem that one hand is catching the other.
And Google is the answer to all questions
Where is my banana?
(I admit, that I was not aware that Happy Mac stood for "that icon", too.)
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for? The benefit of the visual icon and a label for further clarification? Also. How does one write. "copy current selection to the clipboard then erase it from the screen" in 20x20 pixels? I'm sure others could think of longer winded phrases that have common corresponding icons.
you're the cause of so much wasted time (outside of /. ;)
I can store the collective works of Shakespeare in a 10 Mb zip file. The collective paintings of Michelangelo, scanned and compressed with zero data loss, would probably be 100 Gb at least.
And yet, the collective works of Susan Kare could probably be compressed down to 1 or 2 kilobytes. Talk about minimalism!
Used to make "wordcon" menus with MSDOS batch files. I suppose you could make great ones with current tools, or you could butcher your GUI and remove all graphcs.
BTW, ever wonder how much brain power does it take to convert all those words back into the images your brain processes?
So instead of buying her flowers and sending her chocolates, you slashdot her server. What kind of thanks is this!?!
Because when I applied 1000 monkeys designing icons on 16x16 I found that she'd already come up with all the good ones.
Maybe now that her site is feeling the power of the geek, she'll feel inspired to make an icon for the fabled slashdot effect to commemorate the tormenting of her poor webserver.
Icons are nice to learn where things are. Eventually the muscle memory takes over and they become unnecessary. You could change my trashcan icon to a picture of anything and I would still drag files to it because I know that that's where the trash is.
I modified the icon bar in Mail.app the way I liked it and have been using it that way for about a year now. I recently mucked it up and had to reinstall it. I modifed the icon bar again, but didn't put the "delete" button back in the same spot. Good thing the icon is there, because my mouse still automagically moves to where it is 'supposed' to be, but isn't anymore.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
With that 16x16 canvas, this woman managed to make images that have become part of everyday household life for many people. Her work has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people at least, and I believe some of her work is still showcased in the moricons.dll file. Just because a canvas is small, doesn't mean it's unimportant.
I remember making Mac icons myself. One of the most interesting/exploitable things about early Mac icons was that they were somewhat viral. If you instered a disk with an icon that the system didn't have, it would add it to the systems set of icons. Sometimes it would even replace an 'official' icon with the hacked one, but I never quite figured out when it would vs. wouldn't do this.
As an example, I was bored waiting for someone I carpooled with in college, so I started diddling around on one of the campus library computing lab's macs. Using resedit I changed the MacPaint icon to a rather x-rated female figure. (rather difficult to do well in 16x16 pixels, or whatever it was). About 6 months later one of my frat brother's younger sibling showed me "this neat icon that replaced the MacPaint icons at high school"... It was my icon!
When I had made it originaly I didn't know it would spread (bad pun), I expected it to just mess with the one library machine. Experimenting some more I discovered the icon capturing effect, but as I said I never figured out the complete set of rules.
Next week, I guess we'll be treated to an expose' on the dude who wrote Windows' auto-insert notification code?
I mean... we had to use some icons, and those icons had to be made by somebody, and it happened to be her. My guess is that it is most likely one of those "right place, right time" kind of things. I figure she was just the most adept (of the Mac developer team) at making icons moreso than it was a case of Steve Jobs ordaining "Find me the best iconographer on the planet!".
This is much like how people get famous in the music industry. Why did Britney Spears get famous while the thousands of similarly mediocre talent did not? Because, contrary to what Einstein asserted, God does play with dice, and some stuff is due to pure happenstance.
So, now she's parlayed that initial luck into a cult of personality. Good for her.
Now, for something truly interesting to do while we're at the site... how many people think that there was deliberate thought given to which icons you can get on the various bits of clothing that she sells on her site. Specifically, note the women's thong. Among other limitations, you cannot get a thong with:
- The dead fish
- The sushi roll
- The rolling dice (think STD's)
- The cherries
So... you gotta ask yourself, did the various icon/clothing combinations go through some deliberate "hidden meaning" censorship?
Thus not only is it easier to recognize a trashcan over the word trashcan, but you immadiately intuit that you can put things into a trash can, move a trashcan and so forth.
Some people confused this aspect of UI to mere metaphor. This led to all sorts of horrible interfaces - many that pushed metaphor. The problem was that the power of icons and mice wasn't metaphoric but a kind of embodied action. You can have embodied actions with CLIs as well. Indeed many aspects of CLI do this - although they tend to be more complex than icons.
It is unfortunate that these aspects of UI design are so often neglected.
Dude, you haven't lived until you've dropped Happy Mac. What a TRIP!!
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Some folks may remember the happy mac actually winked at you during startup in one of the OS 8 versions. It was quickly yanked- Apple supposedly got a backlash(or feared one) from cultures/countries where winking is offensive; search on google and you'll find a ton of links about it.
Similarly, they yanked at one point the Chimes Of Death(doo wee do doooooo) that accompanied the dead-mac(and error code dump), usually caused by severe hardware or software problems during booting in older macs. It genuinely freaked people out(I know it scared the shit out of me the first time i heard it.)
Random trivia- most of the original Macintosh's ROM was taken up by a COLOR image of the Macintosh development team. My 660AV's ROM contained an image of the team(much larger) at a beachparty. It is so sad to see that easter eggs have pretty much been killed off for years now in apple hardware/software.
Curious- Did she design the Spinning Pizza of Death, in OS x?
Obligitory slashdotting joke: Her site could use the SPOD right about now :-)
Please help metamoderate.
The point of icons is not so much that you can instantly know the function of an unfamiliar icon by looking at the picture. It's more that you can recognise that icon again easily once you know what it does. I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons. You also need much less screen real estate in a small icon (such as a toolbar button) than an equivalent text button.
Even though you are trying to look as if you know something about UI and usablility, you obviously don't know anything.
Score -1, misleading.
Exactly. Why don't you try to come up with something good on only a 16x16 pixel canvas.
I don't think you're supposed to care about it, it's just that you just might find it interesting. The whole point might be just what you said, that there is only so much one can put on a 16x16 canvas, and the skill and artistry comes in seeing how much information can be conveyed in such a restricted area.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I think that's kinda the point, doing so much with so little, especially considering that she was making squares look like curves. If you can create better looking icons than hers while subject to the same conditions and limitations I'm sure we'd all enjoy seeing them (ascii goatse.cx does NOT count)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Moof! Says the dogcow.
That's right, everything you needed to customize your computer's behavior, condensed into a single window 312x155 (roughly) pixels in size. What's more, all the functions are discoverable, neither instruction nor a help file is necessary to use it. It's perhaps one of the most brilliant examples of efficient information display ever realized on a personal computer, plus interactivity thrown in for good measure.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Silly, it's not elitism when you're doing it to someone else!
Oh, wait...
Game... blouses.
This Susan Kare chick is a MILF!
Results for GIS of "Susan Kare"
Since those "graph paper doodles" need to look like something else when you shrink them down I'd say that hiring a doctor of fine arts to perform fooling of the eye was the best way to get a quality product quickly.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
since that's been incorrect for years. Of course, it will probably be replaced with a pyramid with a eye on top of it soon.
You mean moricons.dll?
I was disappointed that despite the file name, none of the icons depicted composer Ennio Morricons...
You don't get out enough.
Sorry, but you're wrong.
Here's a revelation for you: people are different.
I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons.
Well, I can much more quickly find a text label in a sea of other text labels, than an icon I know in a sea of other icons. Does that make you "wrong"? No. People are different. This isn't "right" or "wrong". Deal with it.
to create a slashdotted icon?
Here's the right Google cache link
Too many zeros, not enough ones
Given that you can only realistically expect about twenty unique designs per monkey, you really need 200,000,000 monkeys (for a 16x16 black and white canvas). Given that there are only a 12 monkeys to the barrel, that's a quite a lot of fun!
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Maybe you should get some better-educated IT guys. Knowledge of the way computers and software work can help one make intelligent decisions about how to set them up, help one diagnose problems, and help one write custom software to get a job done.
How does knowledge of how a btree works help someone figure out a driver issue? There is a huge difference in having a basic understanding of how software environments work vs specific algorithms (which is the the OP referred to). What would an IT person be coding to require them to know about the complexities of freeing/allocating memory. Hell, the current thinking is that we don't want PROGRAMMERS (Java, C#, HLL, scripting, etc) to have to deal with such issues, let alone the guy who unpacks the Dell and installs Office a dozen times a day.
Good admins are programmers/engineers, too. That makes them more expensive, but they can be much more efficient and flexible that way.
I disagree. Anyone who knows any more than very basic programming will probably be a programmer. You get paid more and you put up with a lot less sh*t, assuming of course you can find a job right now, in which case they would settle for an IT job to pay the bills. The only time I see programmers act as IT guys is in small shops that can't afford full time IT folk (or if their IT folk are like many of the IT folk I've met and sometimes take, umm, a while shall we say to get what seems like the most basic things done, like add more ram to your system). And I would never let an IT guy near any code (other than os scripting).
Tell me again why we are supposed to care about this? There is only so much you can put on a 16x16 canvas.
True. Good thing Susan Kare had a 32x32 canvas to work with (the size of all Mac icons from the original 128K Mac through OS 9.1).
If you can create better looking icons than hers while subject to the same conditions and limitations
I contend that she did nothing special because if she didn't do it, someone else would have and the results would have been identical because of those limitations.
Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection.
You've never played DDR, or maybe even video games, have you? When you're familiar with it, processing an image is pretty much instantaneous, not that it's terribly slow in the first place for simple stuff like this.
This is what Linux needs (i.e., gnome/kde) - some GOOD icons. I'm sorry, but the stuff that's being used now is crap. A mix of artsy, well drawn crap with crapy crap. This woman's icons both a) LOOK GOOD, and b) convey MEANING...
Let's politely (after the nasty slashdoting) ask her to whip some up for us. I'd paypal a few $'s for some nice, professional KDE icons, wouldn't you?
I'd have to disagree with you violently there. I can think of several examples: The cross. National flags. The gold-star sticker.
I'm not sure you can define the cross, or national flags, or other extremely common symbols as "art", unless you want to stretch stretching the definition to the point of absurdity... i.e. saying that "art" includes all human symbols and structures that can be represented visually. Is the symbol of a circle "art"? How about a white flag, or a crescent moon?
What distinguishes art from mere symbols? "Art" has to be copied faithfully to the original form. Susan Kane's icons appear, pixel for pixel, exactly as she created them. Their origin can be traced to a single, original source (the artist).
Symbols like the cross have been visually represented in millions of different forms by millions of people. The symbolic origin is obvious (crucifixion of Christ), but there is no such "artistic" origin. The cross is a symbol not because one brilliant artist invented it, but because it was a simple and obvious way to represent an event that was passed along through oral and written tradition.
I'm computer literate. I've worked on dozens of systems from the commodore PET to the IBM Sys/36 and AS400 to HP 3000 and lately some of the Stratus boxes that started rolling through our companies 'bullpen'.
I've never used a mac except a few times in passing.
I use MS Windows and Linux and HPUX and Solaris and even ftx (a Stratus OS) on a daily basis. I've also been using and programming the Mac since a few weeks after it came out.
If you're not familiar with the Mac after nearly two decades then I'm sorry but you are *NOT* computer literate.
It was designed explicitly for the non-computer literate.
It was designed to be accessable to the computer illiterate. But that's an inclusive thing, not exclusive. It is (and always has been) a superb machine for software hackers because it has a much more open and customizable operating system than MSDOS or Windows have ever had. YOu can replace or enhance *anything*.
You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about
What a strange thing to say when the Mac "HFS" file system is nearly unique in being based totally around b-trees for the directory and file extents structures! There isn't a flat array or linked list in sight.
Archive.org link
http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_2.gif
http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_6.gif
etc...
Tell me again why Haiku is such a popular form of poetry? Three lines? Whatever. And why can't basketball players just grab the ball and run without all that dribbling? And who the hell decided that the 'blues' should have only 3 chords?
With a single bit deep, you have 2^256 (10^80) images to choose from. (With 8-bit color, it's 256^256 (10^600+).) I have to agree, with 16x16, the possibilities are limited. I'm guessing that Susan Kare just printed them all on her ImageWriter and used the best ones.
Somewhat offtopic, and definitely the wrong site, but... I like the clean look of Win2k, with Appearance set to "Windows Classic". I'm running XP Pro now, and I despise the soft, blurry, fuzzy, pastel icons. I've done the easy adjustments MS allows, and found a package of ME icons that I use with Microangelo. Any links out there for going the rest of the way? In particular, the loudspeaker icon on the taskbar and the Control Panel icons are bugging me.
Why did the control panel icon from Win 3.0 look likes something ripped from from an Amiga? It had the Amiga's (original) logo colors, a large "A" and small computer with a built in keyboard.
Here's a picture
Assassin: One who murders by surprise attack, especially one who carries out a plot to kill a prominent person.
These people were hardly assassinated. If you don't stop at military checkpoints, they WILL shoot you. It's that simple. In fact, if you pose a potential threat and don't follow orders that you are given, then you get shot.
Similar things happened when we were fighting in Vietnam. Children would run out to hug the soldiers. Unfortunately, some of the children had live grenades that they would use to kill them. Our troops started gunning down anyone running towards them in self-defense.
Her icon for "500 Internal Server Error" leaves much to be desired.
who says slashdot will not help you get laid?
It's more that you can recognise that icon again easily once you know what it does.
So, if I start a new program, should I then see:
a) Ten kazillion icons with no explaination ('cept MouseOver)
b) A minimalist program that'll use descriptive text names with icons, putting icons on a quickbar as they come under heavy use (with the optional drag&drop if I want it there myself)
Personally, I think icons are overrated compared to an alphabetically sorted lists and well thought out menus, even though I want a *few* icons. But heh, people are different.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When you say,
Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection
In heavily left-brained individuals, the icons can actually begin to lose their meaning due to reliance on the converse side of the brain. It works both ways, too; a heavily right-brained person will have much more trouble manipulating something like a pull-down menu than, say, the OS X Dock.
It's actually not very common either, to have a prevalence of one-sidedness (literal) to your brain that would work to impede the ability to derive meaning from both glyphs and word-shapes.
Having said that, icons are a well-proven visual tool that work extremely well most of the time, given proper usage, and there's bucketloads of information backing this up right through pre-history to your first carbon cave-scratchings.
It is possible that you don't see them this way. And, on another note, did you really think that all those little pictures in every single end-user operating system were just spurious fluff?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Wouldn't it be interesting to learn that she designed the Windows 3.1 icons on Mac Paint? :)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
wow, can you imagine just how much money she is probably going to make off of her online store today? that part of the site is fully operational, lol. cgi scripts that display her portfolio (icons she created) are dead through...
And no, implementing "skins" does not fix the problem.
I also like the sunglasses-road-trip icon too. Ahh, memories. Anyone else have favorite icons from that dll?
and said there was a misconfiguration. I wouldn't root her box to discover what was specifically wrong.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
A good example of this was when I was at a friends house on his linux box, and I asked him what his browser was, I immediatly searched for anything that had a world in it, since that is most commonly for web browsers. I had to point over all of them because in Gnome they were all just weird blobs, when I'm at home, I have to point out Mozilla to people because they don't know what the little dragon thing is.
Does anyone know where I can find a downloadable sound sample of the "Chimes of Death"? I'm not a mac user and I'm interested in hearing them...
I used to design icons (still do sometimes) so feel free to regard my reply as a little bit biased.
O OOTOOOOOOO
A poorly made set of icons can indeed be worse than text. I think the really crucial element is whether different icons or wordcons are easily distinguishable. Your brain can easily pick out unique features. for example:
OOOOOOOOOOOOOQOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
notice how that T is much easier to spot that that Q? Icons that all look similar will be more difficult to pick out than words. However, to some extent, text looks like text looks like text, and a set of icons that have been designed to be easily distinguishable from each other will be easier for most people to pick out than a bunch of wordcons. Yes, there is a learning curve where you have to figure out what the icons mean, but I typically learn that pretty fast, and then I process icons faster than text. I would say that once they are learned, you're stripping away a "level of indirection". After all, kids who haven't learned to read yet can process pictures... you learn how to do that very early.
As an aside, people read lowercase, serifed fonts faster than uppercase sans-serif fonts because uppercase sans-serif fonts have fewer distinguishing features for each letter. Your speed of reading, or your speed of picking out icons, doesn't happen on a conscious level. Even if you're annoyed by icons, they might be helping you anyway.
Your point about the trashcan icon is kind of interesting, and true. The point of an icon is that it evokes a general concept. A trashcan icon that is too detailed can make you think of a particular trash can, or a particular type of trashcan -- a simple one should just make you think of the platonic form of trashcan. It should work sort of like the word "trashcan", except that you can read it faster, and tell it apart from other icons more easily. (That's why the simplicity of Kare's icons is so awesome.) So yes, it would work much better if it's appearance were consistent across OS's.
The idea of trying to pick a tool in photoshop using printed names -- "paintbrush, history brush, pencil" -- instead of icons makes me shudder.
blah blah blah
BTW, GS/OS 6 is able to access HFS partitions on a IIgs hard disk, and HFS-formatted floppies.
;) It was the first GUI I ever used.
Yeah. GS/OS r0x0r
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
This is how MCSEs and suchlike happen - people who aren't real geeks and have no idea what's really going on, are taught to "click here, then here, then there" so when the icon moves, they're lost. Knowing what a btree is is just a part of "getting it" that anyone should have if they are let loose with powerful tools.
I wouldn't hire someone like Taco for anything either. Not knowing the difference between "their" and "they're" is just unacceptable, even if he didn't NEED to know and/or had spell checkers at his disposal. It'd be like showing up to the interview in board shorts, sandals, and a loud shirt... it may not affect one's actual job performance, but if the candidate can't even put in minimal effort, what am I expected to think?
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
I don't know, but the PC version of GEM (Atari licensed GEM from DRI) had a trashcan and that got Digital Research sued...
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
curl -s http://www.happyfunball.com/hfb.html | sed s/[Bb]all/Mac/g
Will work much better....
He's got sed replacing mac with ball
That's the point exactly. How do you cram a complex concept like "use this to change the window size" or "the system is busy, wait a bit" into a 16x16 B&W image in such a way that one can easily deduce what that function is? It's hard enough already to decide to use a trash can for computer files or a wristwatch to indicate activity (remember that no one had ever designed icons before), and much harder to draw an instantly recognizable trash can with those constraints.
n.
1. One who advocates a moderate or conservative approach, action, or policy, as in a political or governmental organization.
2. A practitioner of minimalism.
adj.
1. Of, relating to, characteristic of, or in the style of minimalism.
2. Being or providing a bare minimum of what is necessary.
Those would be examples of poor icon designs then. That doesn't invalidate icons as a concept.
And here's a revelation for you: if you read the post to which I was replying (yeah, I know, this is Slashdot, what am I thinking?), it seems likely that you would agree with me that (s)he was wrong, since the original poster was flat out saying that icons were evil and should be replaced by text in all situations. I stand by my statement that the original poster is simply wrong - because all the evidence indicates that a great many people find icons useful, even if there may be a few outliers who do not. Regardless of your personal preference, it seems clear that it would be a UI design blunder to globally replace all icons with text buttons, which it seemed the original poster was implying.
Agreed. I generally detest icons. I only find them useful for inherently visual-spatial tasks, like modeling or image editing. Toolbars of ugly, low-resolution, non-informative icons that require me to read a tooltip to even get the foggiest idea of what it's meant to do, really irk me. I always turn them off for any program I can. I can scan text labels much more fluidly.
Whether or not this will always be the case (in the future software vendors may actually determine more effective visual cues) I don't know, but certainly presently is for me.
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
Well, I think the original poster was just exaggerating his/her point a bit. Regardless: you still posted your point as being an "absolute fact" that icons are better, which is no better than the original poster.
I don't think the original poster's post was "flamebait", just his/her opinion (also incorrectly stated as fact, but anyone with half a brain cell could deduce that that was the only problem with it - apart from that, he/she has a point).
Personally I like (well-designed, attractive) icons in certain situations, and I know that many other people actually prefer them - probably the majority of people. I'm simply in favour of choice. Today's computers are powerful enough to offer a choice to users in this matter. Heck, the computers of the 1980's were powerful enough to offer a choice in this matter. So I don't see what the point of bickering about it is.
There was a while that my work PC had this as its Windows Wallpaper icon - "Hey, what am I doing on this piece of Intel hardware? :-(".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Please report yourself to the Justice Department immediately.
-John Ashcroft
It really astounds me that this was modded up.
1. There's no citation for this research. What's Insightful here?
2. It contains ad hominem implying ignorance, when it has nothing to support its position. Are we to take this person's word for it?
3. It presumes that the findings of such (unnamed) research shows some sort of uniform value for icons across all parties. Something isn't "complete and utter bullshit" when the finding's of someone's study does not coincide the reality of what an observers knows to be true for themself. 4. It presumes that the result of such research is applicable to the reality of deployed software icons. Since the poster didn't see fit to provide us with any proof as to this "research," one cannot know if it is even meant to apply to actual software. If the premise that given a certain condition X an icon Y is more easily determined within a set of icons Z, doesn't mean, for instance, that Microsoft Office's toolbar (just for example) is at all more efficient than text.
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
If you're in linux, you only need one icon: the one that opens a terminal.
In the new terminal, simply typing 'mozilla &' will open a new browser (assuming mozilla is in the $PATH). But you already knew that, right?
BTW. I do think that icons have been abused. But the origonal poster was giving the impression that all icons are would be better off as text. And that icons have no use. Not that they were being abused.
The "spinning pizza of death" actually originated as a graphical representation of the original NeXT hardware's only winchester-esque drive: the magnet-optical. The alternating black and white slices of the disc were meant to represent reflections on the mirror surface of the disc. (These drives were rather slow, particularly so when writing, due to the two-stage Curie Point process. If the NeXT was waiting for something, it was probably a write to finish, thus the cursor.)
Upon the release of color NeXT hardware, NeXTStep 2.x 'colorized' the disc cursor. This had the side-effect of removing it by a degree from the original visual metaphor.
OS X 1.1 and below had the same, colorized cursor, often referred to as the "spinning beach ball" due to the coloration. 10.2 Aqua-fied the icon, so it now looks... sort of like a gummi something.
(Mac OS 8 and above had their own version of the "spinning beach ball", but that originiated IIRC in HyperCard as a cursor for when the program was busy. I don't believe it was ever colorized - and it was black and white quarters of a circle, unlike the 2-bit (4 grey) NeXTStep optical disc cursor. This cursor is superficially similar to, but as the above narrative describes, historically separate from, the NeXT-derived OS X cursor.)
The one with the bomb icon on it. I don't wear it at airports.
My brother once over-packed a suitcase. He had to sit on it to get it to close. At the airport a guard asked, "Is it okay if I open it up?". My brother quickly said, "No, it will explode!", meaning that it was overpacked and had to be opened with great care.
However, that is not how the guard interpreted it, and got all panicky and called in reinforcements. Gotta be careful with your slang around there.
Table-ized A.I.
I was criticizing the moderation of the post, because it was unwarranted. Your comment wasn't insightful, and it had no facts to be checked. There is no such thing as "common sense" when making blanket statements about the value of certain aspects of visual cognition. You can't simply apply what you recall, remember, believe, think, or assume to have learned from a source you cannot provide to another discussion.
I agree that the original poster was being fairly general in his criticism of icons, but it doesn't mean the moderators should empower your equally generalized, and if I might add, flamebait of a post with its 5, Insightful status.
Perhaps he believes all icons would be better off as text. If they're consistently and constantly abused in his experience, then studies you vaguely recall about visual recognition that were not done on software icons are pretty irrelevant. If on the other hand you actually have sources of research on the effectiveness of the actual usage of icons in real software, then you should, by all means, enlighten us. That would be insightful.
If I have to use Google to verify the content of your post, then a post claiming authority over someone else's witless banter doesn't even deserve your kharma bonus, least of all mod points.
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
Oh, so thats what that icon is supposed to be
people are different.
Individualism is really just part of the collective dogma of western culture. It's not a solid fact. The fact is that there are 4 billion so-called "individuals" on this planet. How different are these "individuals"? A very small part of our genetic makeup varies among each individual. I'd wager that if there were a way to compare thought patterns and beliefs, we'd find even less differences. It's too bad that because of this individualist indoctrinitation, people can't acknowledge that we're really the same. Instead, we try hard to find "differences" to distinguish ourselves and find reasons to fight about them.
If proper studies have been done that show that icons are more user friendly, then I'm afraid it's quite likely your preference for text is just part of your indoctrinated desire to be an individual.
People aren't different. Drugs do not support terrorism. Santa Claus isn't real.
Icons should be used in addition with text to aid recognition (list of files with different file types, toolbars), and occasionly used by themselves when space is important (photoshop tool pallete, system tray), or even when language may be a barrier (road signs are a good example, sometimes only becasue people recognize it (stop signs), other times because it's describing something (people crossing a road)).
The reason why icons can oftern be better than words in terms of fast regongition is because icons can be made more unique than a word. A word can only be made up from a combination of set, common letters in which you can't choose the combination of.
When I upgraded Mac OS X, to version 10.2, I was deeply saddened to find that it no longer displays the "happy mac" when booting, but rather that it was replaced by a more "elegant" apple silhouette and a radial throbber.
Do you think the apple hipsters thought the "happy mac" was a little tacky, or just "dated"? Granted, the icon is of a happy mac classic, but I could easily see it replaced by a "happy flat-panel iMac" or even better, a "happy G3 powerbook" (like mine is).
I like the Klingon-esque red triangle. I actually released a shareware application with that icon in my VB 3.0 days. :)
It's the MS-DOS logo being "drawn." The "burned" part is sketched lines.
This is important stuff to know!
... usually caused by SCSI chain problems (lets be more precise ...) ... who can forget the sheer dread of a SCSI chain failure. which device isn't working? those connectors were physically painful to mess with after a while... the cables sometimes didn't work, gotta keep swapping cables and restarting to see what happens ... people put bad cables back on the rack ...
yup, those were the bad old days
bondi blue forever!
simon
home page
The symbolic origin of the cross is surely not only Christian, unless sssmashy means "*The* Cross" with capitals and all that ... is this what you mean sssmashy? - as adopted by Christian countries for their flags? otherwise I'd say crosses probably belong to universal vocabulary of basic symbols like circles, dots, zig zags... I remember how blown away I was when I found a design I'd always thought of as very celtic (Scots /Irish) cropping up in some African designs. My little theory (and I'd love it if more enlightened people could suggest further readings) is that there are a basic number of ways the human hand moves and strong images to copy, so the same shapes and symbols are going to be pretty universal.
>or what a b-tree does
hey! that's a trick question... a b-tree doesn't do anything... it's a data structure!
-pyrrho
Er, do you really believe that our genetic makeup defines everything about us? That's rather like saying that your average Linux box is no different from a Windows system because the hardware is the same. Software is key, and we're only the same until the brain has been programmed.
http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/ This has more than you'd ever want to know about the Mac easter eggs and sounds... Scroll down to "computer hardware eggs" to hear the system sounds.
This page:
http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/HW-840AV.html
has the images of the beach party and boat.
cheers
front
Check this out: http://kare.com/images/portfolio_14.gif.
I highly recommend the book "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud. Actually it is not a book but a graphic novel, except it is not a novel since it is non-fiction.
It is very well written and is one of the few books that I think EVERYBODY should read (even if you aren't into graphic novels/comics).
John
damn, I'm feeding a troll, aren't I?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Actually, that's not true. Readers do perform pattern recognition. When a fluent reader reads a written page, a lot of what's going on is pattern recognition. There isn't actually that much reading words out letter-by-letter.
For many things, words provide a much better discriminator, because you can more precisely capture meaning, and because there may be no good image for the process in question.
You're right that the software is the key. My point was that there's even less variation in our "software" than in our genome. We're programmed to want to be individuals. Go up to Berkeley and watch all the kids with painful-looking piercings and you'll see what I mean. Do the piercings make them different? Or are they just sadly following their "be an individual" programming by mutilating themselves? You be the judge.
Yeah - but I only had a 1000. Do you think I'd get better icons that she hadn't made already if I'd brought more monkies?
I also like the sunglasses-road-trip icon too. Ahh, memories. Anyone else have favorite icons from that dll?
I was always fond of the macguyver style swiss army knife icon. The foxpro fox icon worked well for games too assuming you weren't using fox pro on the system.
Have you considered renting or leasing your monkeys? That can be very economincal.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
I've got a PowerMac 8100 that occupies a position of power in the garage with its 21 inch Apple monitor on a heavy duty shelf. I tend to start it and walk back into the kitchen during its approximately 2 minute long bootup sequence.
The 8100 bootup crash sound is a sound sample of brakes screeching followed by a loud crash of vehicle into something immobile. I ran into the garage when I heard that sound a year ago thinking that a car had crashed through my garage door. Yikes! It was just the CMOS battery that had run low which triggered it, and I rebooted it and figured out that it was the Mac that crashed, replaced the battery a week later and I haven't heard that sound since.
Now that's an easter egg. BTW, if you have an old Mac 512k, take it apart and look on the inside of the shell casing: you'll find the signatures of the Mac development team in it.
Your example gave the opposite result for me. The 'Q' actually has a descender on it and "pops out" visually from the line with Os on it, whereas the 'T' is confined to the same vertical limits as the Os and does not visually "pop out." This is obviously also a function of the font being used and not a disagreement with your premise. I'm trying to think of the link on visual crowding and visual psychophysics for this.
The other thing that is important in symbology (which is important in designing air traffic controller displays, or military displays with icons or symbols or letters representing individual troops or armaments or hardware) along with recognizability is differentiability. If you've got multiple symbols on a crowded display, how do you make particular features stand out and how do you make multidimensional representations in symbols and icons?
One way is to have the symbol represent one thing (type of object) and its color represent another thing (category of object, e.g. increasing altitude, decreasing altitude, steady altitude, or red and green for the opposing positions in a football team instead of Xs and Os).
And small symbols subtend less than half-a-degree of visual arc, they are extremely tiny. Most of the color matching and color discrimination work has been done using 10 degree and 2 degree spots. The CIE XYZ and CIELAB color spaces (from the 1930s and the 1970s) all used relatively large targets compared to the size of icons on the original Mac or text on current screens.
Aye, there's the rub. Making small symbols distinguishable is important, but I don't know any easy-to-follow rules on how to do it. I haven't heard about the effect of amount of visual arc before, but I am still wary of using color (without redundant indicators), because you can very easily make things confusing for people who are colorblind. I've read some of Tufte's stuff on color, and I'm starting to think it's often used inappropriately: for example to indicate ordering by hue, when there's really no natural ordering to it. (ROYGBIV, of course, but that is not an internalized, intuitive ordering for most people. using brightness/darkness might work ok.) I've seen people use color to indicate magnitude, and that's not the greatest idea because a linear increase in, say, the amount of green or saturation or brightness, isn't going to be perceived linearly. You'd have to use a perceptual color space like CIELAB of CIECAM... and most designers and engineers aren't color vision nerds enough to do it. I'm not saying you can't do very good things with color -- you certainly can. But it's hard, while it's very easy to do bad things with color.
There's a lot of sciency cognitive psych knowledge required to do truly good User Interface design (of which icon design is a subset, I suppose). Unfortunately, there is no unified science of UI design, and most of us are stumbling around half-blind and just doing the best we can.
Sorry this is a bit off-topic. But, kris lang, i'd love to know a bit more about CIELAB and stuff, because I've forgotten most of what I learned about it. If you get a chance, can you send some references my way? (my yahoo messaging id is available in my user info i think.)
blah blah blah