Re: Icons

["Brooks, Steven (Jay)" <jsbrooks -at- INGR -dot- COM>]

Are icons necessary or desirable?  Using an icon  forces the reader to
remember what the icon means, or look somewhere in the doc to find out.
We just use the words -- WARNING, CAUTION, NOTE -- with style changes to
make them stand out from regular paragraphs.

Of course, even with using words, the user has to remember the
difference between WARNING and CAUTION or DANGER.  However, this should
be obvious from the statement immediately following the word/icon.

A dummy page is a good idea.  If I find myself using too many special
statements on a single page, I evaluate and restructure the info so the
impact of the important statements is not lost.

Steve Brooks
e'mail:  jsbrooks -at- ingr -dot- com

>----------
>From:  Wayne J. Douglass[SMTP:wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM]
>Sent:  Wednesday, April 30, 1997 4:11 PM
>To:    TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
>Subject:       Re: Icons
>
>At 03:30 PM 4/30/97 -0500, Rob wrote:
>
>>The manuals I have consulted define "warning, "caution" and "note" but do
>>not
>>provide examples of generally accepted icons for each. Can you tell me,
>based on
>>the following descriptions, if the icons we are creating are acceptable?
>>
>>WARNING: a triangle with an exclamation point inside it.
>>CAUTION: a triangle inside another triangle.
>>NOTE: the word "note" with a triangle pointing to the text to the right.
>>(lots of triangles!)
>>
>In general, when I see cute icons I reach for my air sickness bag, but I'm
>surely in a minority here.
>
>Do yourself a favor, Rob. Create a dummy page where you use all of your
>icons and see what it looks like. What seems like a good idea where there is
>only one icon per page can look pretty awful or silly when there are more
>than one.
>
>--Wayne Douglass
>
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