Alphabet soup in our docks
Forgive my rant, but Macromedia is perpetuating an annoying trend with their icons. Rather than creating icons that are at least somewhat indicative of the function of their applications, companies like Microsoft and Macromedia are lazily designing unimaginative stylized "letter" icons.
Let's see, my dock already has a W, two E's, an X, and a P. Now if I choose to purchase Macromedia's MX line (and add those apps to my dock), I will have an F, an FW, and a D, (Scratch that, I hate Fireworks).
Granted, the green swirly thing and the pink swirly thing gave little indication of app function, but they were uniquely recognizable as the Dreamweaver and Flash logos.
At least if we had more apps that started with vowels, we could spell things in our dock.
From Think Secret:
Let's see, my dock already has a W, two E's, an X, and a P. Now if I choose to purchase Macromedia's MX line (and add those apps to my dock), I will have an F, an FW, and a D, (Scratch that, I hate Fireworks).
Granted, the green swirly thing and the pink swirly thing gave little indication of app function, but they were uniquely recognizable as the Dreamweaver and Flash logos.
At least if we had more apps that started with vowels, we could spell things in our dock.
From Think Secret:
Comments
There are TONS of Macromedia replacements...
Granted I'm REALLY getting tired of my 2 E's a W and an H.
Mac Guru
[ 03-06-2002: Message edited by: Mac Guru ]</p>
<strong>xicons...
There are TONS of Macromedia replacements...
Granted I'm REALLY getting tired of my 2 E's a W and an H.
Mac Guru
[ 03-06-2002: Message edited by: Mac Guru ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Hey, just add that 'd' that was in the first post and you'd have 'weed'. I think it should be a game we play here: dock scrabble. It would be fun
[ 03-06-2002: Message edited by: starfleetX ]</p>
That's actually a pretty good point though.
<strong>Hmm... I never really noticed the trend with all the letter icons. I've got 2 e's, 2 x's, 1 p, 1 w, 3 m's, 1 x, and 1 a. Sheesh!</strong><hr></blockquote>
isnt that 3 x's?
Not sure if the B counts... it's BBEdit, and has been that way for years!
Amorya
<strong>isnt that 3 x's?</strong><hr></blockquote>D'oh! Well, that shows you what today's university education is worth!
editing to fix...
the folks at iconfactory still make the most drop-dead gorgeous os x icons on the planet (dave brasgalla is a friggin' genius).
[ 03-06-2002: Message edited by: rok ]</p>
I can understand it with M$, but these other companies...I expected more.
And I really fu[kin' hate having a "W" in my dock. No Dubya reminders, please.
I do agree that icons are turning increasingly unimaginative. In fact a strict definition of an icon would exclude letters. It's got to be some sort of graphic. The new 128x128 icons are pretty, but their often photorealistic nature bothers me. Icons are supposed to be stylized representations of the application for which they stand. E.g. How would you know what OS X's hard drive icon represents if you've never opened up your computer and seen a hard drive? Photorealistic "icons" are useless. I long for the late 80s, when Apple was the posterchild of good icon design.
I love the Adobe icons: they indicate their function wihtout letters and you can recognize an Adobe app by the family resemblance among the icons. But my all time favorite icon is the <a href="http://www.panic.com/transmit/"; target="_blank">Transmit truck icon</a>. It's pretty, not a photo and indicates that you can use Transmit to truck files back and forth to a server via FTP. Brilliant!
Escher
<strong>i think that you have to consider the 90% of other Mac users who are not power users like us... (I can just imagine my parents for example... they bought a cube and 15inch tft and do little else but word, email, and browsing... DOH!) will they remember the first letter of the application or some artsy image? Granted that when you scroll over the icons the name of the app appears, but still... I think that joe-user remembers the first letters of the application rather than a nice icon...</strong><hr></blockquote>
i don't think so. The iTunes icon is FAR better than a T or an i in the dock. The whole point of an icon is to convey emotion and purpose regardless of language, not to force the user to remember what his applications are named. Applications are used to complete tasks, and the task needs to be represented to the user, not the incidental and often arbitrary name of the program. (Excel? Entourage? Outlook Express? WTF?)
So, say, Excel would be a spreadsheet, rotated 45 degrees, with the little X in the lower right hand corner.
Powerpoint? Pile of Slides, P in right hand bottom corner.
Word, text document Ã* la TextEdit, with W.
You get the idea...