Icons: A Universal Language
Have you ever noticed how many pictures you look at every day? Whether on Instagram, Twitter, your favorite news source, or even on the streets of the city you live in. Some of these images are more than just a pretty piece of art or a picture of a friend; they are helpful tools that assist us in getting through our day-to-day lives. Icons are the images that serve as a universal language and appear in numerous tools we use every day. Instead of taking the time to read and understand words, icons give us meaning to something that we can readily understand in less than a second. They offer an opportunity to explore the world, no matter what part of it you are from.
Today, I decided to count the number of icons I encountered to better understand the effect that they have on my everyday life. There happened to be too many to count on ten fingers, so I decided to recall them by order in which I saw them. First, I woke up to the alarm on my phone. The alarm icon was next to the name of the alarm and the time. When looking at it, I noticed that the old-fashioned alarm clock icon is so widely used, yet the physical alarm clock that looks like that seems so ancient.
Next, I made myself some espresso with my Nespresso machine. The machine used multiple icons for pouring coffee and steaming milk. Of course, it also had the power on/off button, an icon that is used on countless electronics these days. After that, I packed up my things and went to the elevator in my apartment building. Up and down icons were used as well as an alarm button on the inside just in case the elevator stopped working. The alarm button had an image of a bell, another old-looking item representing a modern feature. After that, I got in my car which was, unsurprisingly, filled with icons. I followed the icon-filled street signs to get to a coffee shop then finally sat down and opened my laptop to start working. My computer was probably the most infested with icons that I saw all day (excluding my phone, but that one is obvious). Icons for all of the applications I have installed on my computer paired with icons inside the applications provided an infinite number of options, clicks, and messages-all of which I clearly recognized. This was just the first half of my day to give you an idea of the number of icons that me, and probably every other human being on the earth, happen to encounter in a 24-hour span.
What fascinated me the most about observing and understanding every icon that I came in contact with during my day was how old the actual image is for so many icons. Telephones, alarm clocks, floppy disks, bells, film, flashlights, and padlocks are just a few of the images used on the most modern icons today, yet the actual concept of them may be foreign to someone of Generation Z. Do they even remember using a corded phone? Did they ever pick up a physical address book? It’s crazy to think that millennials are that old (yes, I said it). Icons tend to maintain an old image that appeals to older crowds and even less-privileged crowds, many of which are unfamiliar with newer technologies and the latest iPhone, per say. Icons are the universal language that binds us together in this electronic world. They help us understand where we are and where we are going. They help us get through simple every-day tasks, whether work-related or family-related. Any productive action we take these days usually involves at least a small handful of icons. While some people may not encounter icons as much as others, I believe if you take a look around you, you will find that icons are overwhelmingly important to us and serve as an additional language we didn’t even realize we were fluent in.
