The idea is that you have a small symbol to represent an object or action or whatever you like. The deal is, this symbol should accentuate existing labels. Using icons alone to identify things should be avoided at all costs.
It's funny that the word "hieroglyphics" is often used to describe something that is unclear, confusing and/or archaic. "Icons" however, are often connected to ideas of usability, functionality and clarity.
But if you want to delete all your text labels and replace them with "user friendly" icons, you honestly have some serious void between your ears.
Here's some example hieroglyphs:
The Save Button! Yes, thats right, the save button. It's pretty stupid. Sure, it's almost universally known that this icon means save - but then again, will this picture not be totally irrelevant in a couple years, if it isn't already? When is the last time you used a floppy disk? Most likely it was in 1999, when you were backing up your important shit waiting for the Y2K bug to make your computer explode. These days, with inventions like the flash drive and Cialis, floppy disks are now ancient history. The Save icon will mean to those of tomorrow as much as the slide rule means to us today.
Mac OS X's Dockbar - ( a borrowed clipping from this screenshot ) Ah yes, a lot of people think its super duper. But is this progress? Lets see what terrific objects the dockbar provides the user:
- Blue Happy Face - Is anybody actually supposed to understand what clicking on this dude does?
- Eagle Postage Stamp - No, its not pictures of birds, its your email.
- Compass Pointing to Nowhere - What the hell is this? Mapping software? GPS?
- Evil Red Bird - Click the slightly more evil looking bird for extra functionality!
- Talk bubble armed with a camera chasing a yellow man - It's iPaparazzi!
- Whatever the next thing is - I'm tired of guessing.
Now I know that if you mouse over one of these massive icons it will give you the name of the application, and we all know how informative application names are. Especially in KDE. Sure.
If you are going to make a totally graphic based interface, you better make sure your icons are the least ambiguous things on the planet or else you're going to confuse the bejesus out of the user. Is that my email application, or a cross dressing penguin? You're throwing out whatever clear natural language instructions you had in your program to make things look cool. Thats fine if you don't have to field the support calls, in which you would inevitably be saying things like "Yes, yes, click the icon that looks like a penguin". Good job. Designs like that get you bonuses!
The best solution would be to scrap icons in favour of nicely coloured and anti-aliased Mandarin. It would make as much sense as icons do now, the characters would be relatively compact and aesthetically pleasing. At the same time, we'd all be learning some chinese, and we wouldn't have to make changes to the software to be able to bring it to the chinese market. It's win-win-win-win.