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Weblog:   Icons, Usability and Computers
Subject:   Am I the only one who seems to understand this?
Date:   2006-01-25 07:58:30
From:   W2ed
What is the best and worst thing about art? (think about this for a second...)


Give up? It's all up to the interpretation.


I think icons are becoming more and more like art everyday: with applications, they try to show you what they interpret as the underlying image for the project. So Safari's compass is kinda like a guide to navigating the web, as you would use a regular compass to navigate a map. iPhoto and iTunes? Great representation: they're probably the first things you think of when you think of images and music, respectively.


The only way to really understand what Apple meant with the Quicktime icon is to take a look at the animations of the logo, which makes it an awful interpretation for what it is. Explaining it as art doesn't always work.
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  • Tom Bridge photo Am I the only one who seems to understand this?
    2006-01-25 08:41:22  Tom Bridge | O'Reilly Blogger [View]

    I appreciate the connection to art, but Macs are supposed to be more usable than any other computer, when in fact the icons aren't terribly usable at all, because the representations are, in fact, interpretable.
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