On Jan 9, 2008 12:04 PM, Grady Kelly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 1. Which are better, Icons or Labels? Are icons perceived differently > in different languages? >
I don't know about better or not, but when faced with the same decision last year at our company, I worked up a set of icons that could be used on our controls. It took a long time and many review cycles. We made tooltip text localizable for the graphical controls. The application originally had the worst of all worlds: text displayed in graphics on control surfaces. It's my understanding that using symbols instead of text for controls is periodically attempted as a way to avoid localization of control surface text, but that these efforts are not always successful. I ended up doing a fair amount of research into international symbols along the way to try to avoid pitfalls. I might not have made the same decision if I was creating an application for a kiosk, or for a pop-in-and-out-of-it web page. Ours is a communications application for trained operators, so it's understood that some hop-on-board time is needed. I've also had some previous experience designing icon symbol sets for specialized applications, so I mostly knew what I was getting into. Unexpected benefit: the eye-candy aspect of making the symbols light up pretty for the various control states got our dev team excited about the redesign. Hope this helps, Michael Micheletti ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
