Looking for icons
The quest: find icons on my 45m2 and make sense of those found. Including the Nikon camera ones.
Icons are everywhere, yet they often go unnoticed. The good ones (easy, simple, understandable ones that convey a clear function) are so good you hardly notice them and they just blur into your consciousness. The bad ones are, well, bad — and therefore you don’t understand them and you don’t remember them. They don’t stick in your memory and you try to avoid them. But they let you have the fun of learning their functions by trial and error every time, so…
Here are few examples of what I found:
Car-key
A clear example of skeuomorphic icons. It plays with the mental image of a padlock locking and unlocking, so what that car lock works slightly differently…
Washing machine
My all time favourite — this round sheep to mark the “wool cycle”. How cute is that!
Intercom
Another old-school icon — a key to signify opening the door by intercom.
Nikon D5600 camera
And then I just headed to the Holy grail of icons reservoir — my Nikon D5600 camera. I don’t think there is one piece of machinery that assembles more signs, icons and indexes on a space that small. The company continues to simplify physical interfaces of their cameras by moving options to the tactile screen. This is an example of how the mode selection used to look vs. how it looks now:
Adding a big tactile screen allowed for more options to be accessible directly through the screen. It didn’t lead to a lesser confusion in their icons, though…
Let’s take an example of one of the setting modes options — Scene. There are 16 system options for the scenery setting. Each of them come accompanied by a label and a photo which all together leaves very little space for confusion. The complete set for a setting looks like this:
When we look at the icons alone, though, it is a different story.
I have decided to try to come up with labels for these icons based solely on my assumptions of what their meaning could be:
And here is what they really mean:
I was actually amused by how little matches there were. I even got the sunrise/sunset wrong, not mentioning what I viewed as a “pizza”…
Nevertheless, the point of this article isn’t to make fun of Nikon’s icons (well, maybe a little bit — I am looking at you, Beach/snow!). I completely understand that these are extremely difficult nuanced situations that are hard to put into a pictogram. Nevertheless, I was wondering why Nikon hadn’t tried to keep consistency with icons that appear multiple times in different contexts. For example, why is “portrait” and “night portrait” in completely different styles? The same goes for “landscape” and “night landscape”. By using the same basis for both, they might be more easily learnable by users.
This little experiment made me understand how difficult it is to create an icon that conveys a meaning and does so in a way that is universally understood. Once again I have realized the importance of labels and/or other ways to clarify meaning of icons. It is tricky to rely on icons alone — there might be some pizza at an indoor party, but that is not really the point…
