First of all, I’d like to thank Nate for inviting me onboard the Web-Graphics team over three years ago after I entered the W3Remix competition along with WG authors Radu Darvas and Andreas Bovens. It’s taken me a while, but I have recently been giving thought to an issue which I suspect affects a number of web designers and developers; that of clear, unambiguous iconography.

When I was in Sixth Form (the equivalent of High School for those of you unfamiliar with the UK education system) I had what can only be called an excessive interest in icons and GUI design, brought about by my first exposure to Macs during a computing course. At the time these would have been the very earliest Power Macs, running OS 7.5 (in fact, I think it was still being called ‘System 7′ back then). As the first significant desktop OS I’d used, I was immediately smitten with the Macintosh’s high-resolution display, true colour and delightful interface.

The iconography in use was for the most part simplistic, and the default icons for System 7 were rather dull (although - naturally - still superior to those of Windows 3.1 and the recently released ‘95) but I found it fascinating nonetheless, especially when I discovered that icons could be swapped around and copied and pasted. The first occasion somebody brought in some third-party icons (Simpsons characters, lovingly drawn pixel by pixel) and put them on a Mac at school, I was drawn in for good. At one point I was jokingly asked by my computing teacher if I intended to pursue a career as an icon designer. The idea at the time seemed quite proposterous, but as companies like The Iconfactory and IconBuffet have since shown us, there is a very real commercial demand for high quality iconography.

So why iconoclasm? Well, for starters the purpose of icons has evolved somewhat since their initial inception, which was generally to visually represent a file or application. From control panels to toolbars, and now to web applications, icons have spread in usage and quality. Unfortunately, whilst the standards of clarity in representing concepts have increased, the actual metaphors in use have by and large stayed the same. Recently I mused on this with specific relevence to the save icon, traditionally represented by a 3.5″ floppy disk; in a few years’ time we could well find that most new computer users have never even seen one of these.

So I put it to you, the Web-Graphics community, to challenge these unwise conventions. Are there any icons you find particularly unintuitive, specifically in the sphere of web user interfaces? Some that immediately come to mind (other than Save) are Logout (the very name itself seems rooted in the arcane days of computers that occupied entire rooms and output data via line printer), Edit and Load (for similar reasons to Save). What are your own experiences with iconography and these tasks?

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