Studying icons
 As you may know I'm a big fan of the Bootstrap Toolkit. I like it for the same reason I like standardized user interfaces on desktop computers. The more apps have in common, the more apps people can use. There are also esthetic reasons I like it. Design for the sake of design is not good. Design should enhance the utility of the thing being designed. Too many websites are substituting style for design. I don't want my tools to be examplars of style. I want the to be tool-like, i.e. useful.  The Mac was the first popular computer to standardize its user interface, going so far as to publish user interface guidelines. One of the nice things it did was establish iconography. Symbols that mean the same thing when used in all software. For the most, those icons came to mean the same thing in Windows and Unix apps, as well as web apps. (Apple famously sued Microsoft for using the trashcan icon in Windows, so Windows doesn't use the same icon as the Mac here.)
Now, with Bootstrap 2.0, they introduce the idea of standardized icons for web apps. It's a nice start.
 There's one I'm still looking for. It was a cool little icon they had in the Alarm Clock on the original Mac. It looked like the flags you see on mailboxes in the country. The flag goes up and down. When you flip it down, the window expands to reveal the settings for the clock. Flip it up and they're hidden and just the current time is visible. I want to use this pair of icons in the menubar in Bootstrap. I'm trying to find a picture, but coming up empty. |
