Re: [Usability]Re: Revenge of the Paperless Office

[David Moles <david moles vykor com>]

On Wed, 2002-07-03 at 13:14, Janne Morén wrote:
> 
> To some extent it is already like this. The full-size Evo icon is round
> and yellow; Galeon is blue and bubbly; gnumeric is light blue and
> square; x-chat is red/orange and cross-shaped. What might be needed is
> to make these properties clearer for the mini-icons, and maybe to make a
> point of considering the 'gestalt' (sorry) of icons compared to other
> when designing them.

I think this is the right approach. I find that on my Mac (under OS X)
my most common screwup is to launch Word instead of Mozilla or Mozilla
instead of Word, because their icons both consist of three parallel blue
lines, more or less (for a "W" in the case of Word and an "M" in the
case of Mozilla) -- even though they're different shades of blue and
slanted opposite directions.

Contrasting shapes help the Office icons almost as much as contrasting
colors, I think.