Commentary 18 Toward a Declaration of Icon Independence Brian Pedell, Department of Humanities, Michigan Technological University Before commenting on specific issues in Katherine Haramundanis' article, I would like to establish that it is not my intention in this commentary to challenge the validity of including verbal descriptions with icons. In fact, some empirical evidence has been presented which suggests that mixed modality icons (those with a visual and verbal component) were rated by users to be more effective and memorable than icons without a verbal component. (See Nickels Shirk & Smith's [1994] discussion of icon design issues.) The notion I do think needs to be challenged, however, is Haramundanis' belief that the meanings of icons cannot be learned or understood without the aid of verbal descriptions. There are numerous examples of icons that can stand alone. Consider, for example, the justification, spacing, and character formatting icons commonly found on the ribbons of a number of popular desktop publishing applications. These icons were introduced without accompanying verbal descriptions and have managed to retain their visually independent status across a variety of applications and platforms. Although I could provide many more examples of icons that are visually independent, I would
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Toward a declaration of icon independence
Pedell, Brian
Follow ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
, Volume 20 (2)
Association for Computing Machinery – May 1, 1996
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