maandag 28 december 2009

Pictograms, Icons and Symbols

These also play a large role in VKB.

Pictograms

A pictorgram or pictograph is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration.

Pictograms remain in common use today, serving as signs or instructions. Because of their graphical nature and fairly realistic style, they are widely used to indicate public places such as public toilets, airports and train stations.

A standard set of pictograms (see diagram below) was defined in the international standard ISO 7001: Public Information Symbols.



Symbol

A symbol can be an object, picturem, written word, a sound, or particular mark - that represents something else by association, resemblance, especially a material object useed to represent something invisible. Symbols indicicate or serve as a sign for and represent ideas, concepts, or other abstractions. For example, in some countries a red octagon is the symbol that conveys the particular idea of "STOP".

Emoticons

Graphical symbols or ASCII charactes that convey emotions or emphasize the communication by messages. An example of a well known emotican is a smiley facee :-) or a frowning face :-(

On the web and a large number of modern mobile phones, text emoticons are ofte automatically replaced with small corresponding images. Similarly, in some versions of Microsoft Word, the Auto Correct feature replaces basic smilies such as :-) with a single smiley-like character. Originally, these image emoticons were fairly simple and replaced only the most straightforward and common character sequences. Emoticons have now expanded beyond simple cartoo facial expressions to a variety of still or moving images. Some of these graphical emoticons do not actually represent faces or emotions, for example, an "emoticon" showing a guitar might be used to represent music. Further, some instant messaging software designed to play a sound upon receiving certain emoticons.

Design of icons and symbols

Well-designed icons and symbols cann have the following advantages over writte commands and labels. They ca be:

  • more distinctive
  • more efficient
  • easier to recognise and remember over long periods of time
  • easier and faster to learn when the size of the symbol set is small
  • language inidependent

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