CHAPTER 5
Icons
Icons in a Picker 5-13
■Icons increase the size of a picker, not only in width but also in height. The
larger a picker, the more it obscures what’s beneath it.
■If you have one icon in a picker, you have to make companions for the
other picker items. It can be hard enough to state the name or function of
each picker item in a word or two, let alone to design an intelligible tiny
pictogram for each item.
Use judgment: long pickers may not benefit as much from icons as shorter
ones. Then again, there’s nothing like a good shape to grab a user’s eye once
the user has associated it with something the user is seeking in a long list.
If you decide to include icons in a picker, try to make them useful mnemonic
devices. Use icons to clarify and distinguish the wording of picker items.
Avoid purely decorative doodads. Figure 5-11 illustrates the use of icons
in a picker.
Figure 5-11 Icons can help communicate picker item functions
Icons in lists may represent individual items or they may label some attribute
of each item, such as the type of item.
To be consistent with icons in existing pickers, a picker icon should not exceed
16 pixels in height or 22 in width. This does not mean you should go ahead
and make all your icons 16 pixels high. Consider 16 pixels the maximum icon
height in pickers, to be used only in it it’s difficult to create a recognizable
image with fewer pixels. Only two of the icons in the built-in MessagePad
applications are 16 pixels high: the Log and Put Away items in the In/Out Box.
Where possible, vary the sizes of icons in a picker. It’s not uniform size that
makes icons unify a picker, give visual relief, and jog users’ memories. To
do that, give all the icons in a picker the same visual weight and style, but
unique shapes and configurations.
D
o not exceed 16
p
ixels high by 22
p
ixels wide;
s
maller is better