New answers tagged icons
1
Regardless of what this is supposed to represent, a user will never intuitively know what it is supposed to be.
It's a representation of somebody losing their Gestalt marbles. (2 to be exact)
0
Icons have to mean something somewhere. for example:
The save icon above will be seen on the toolbar without the text and users could use it to map it to the action of saving.
Another example:
Typescript files have the icon in your finder or file system to map it to type script.
The ones like:
Export to BOM
Line Separator
Diagram
The general practice ...
0
Icons are effective inversely proportional to their frequency.
If everything has both text and icons, the interface becomes crowded. I would only add icons to common actions.
IMHO, both your submenu and the menu in the SQL Developer example are too crowded.
1
Each design/development team will have their own criteria for doing this, and hopefully it is aligned to some kind of design system or convention that they have established for their product/service.
Briefly speaking, there might be a number of reasons and it is most likely to be a combination of them, some are design related while others are probably more ...
21
I don't think there's an "official" methodology for this, but I've noticed a pattern across a number of programs. Many programs - especially IDEs - have a number of commands that can be accessed both through drop-down menus and through toolbar buttons. An icon is required for a toolbar button, and the same icon is usually used for that command in the drop-...
2
Simple answer, "Yes".
They chose to provide icons to ubiquitous actions and where applicable they used icons which can be pulled from existing use such as file icons.
There is no need to iconify actions which have esoteric meanings and would differ between one app and another.
Check out Oracle's SQL Developer for more examples on not iconifying everything:...
23
There are a couple of reasons:
If there is a generally accepted icon for that feature. Examples, save, cut, copy etc.
If the feature is borrowed from another application which has an app-icon. For example, sharing on facebook can use the Facebook icon.
Context of use, if a lot of the similar icons are displayed together, the icons will lose their purpose. ...
2
I would recommend only adding icons when they provide value, ie differentiating between javascript and HTML files. Looking at your screenshot, you would need to create a tonne of similar-looking icons for open, settings and exports alone. What value would that have for the user? I would argue it would confuse things.
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