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The first Icons...
They chose their pictures well... well, scientifically.
The icons that were eventually included with the Star Office
Workstation were carefully engineered to be recognized quickly by the
greatest variety of users... In fact, ``the [overall] design
effort took more than six years... The actual implementation
involved from 20 to eventually, 45
programmers...''[1] The `icon designers' mention no
aesthetic considerations whatsoever in their drawing, testing, or
selecting of icons to be included in the Star System. Still, these
were the best graphical user interface icons ever developed--they
were the only ones. Today, hundreds of additional icons have been
tried in graphical applications to represent the same objects and
functions. Many of the preferred icons in use today bear some
resemblance to their ancestral Star bitmaps.
Figure 2:Original Xerox Star Icons
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The role of the visual artist in modern user interface design is
always increasing. Teams working on big GUI projects are
expected to include an artist on the design team from the very
beginning. Too many times in the past, the visual artist has not hired
to help design a user interface until a conflict arises within a
design team. When software is designed by a committee, and an internal
disagreement arises over how some graphical element of an application
should be implemented, graphical artists are ``...often treated
as `firefighters'--called upon in an emergency to repair disasters
not of their own making, under severe time
constraints.''[19] Obviously, this is not giving end
users the benefit of an interface that has been visually conceived
from day one. Experts such as Bruce Tognazzini of Apple Computer
highly recommend that at least one visual artist participate in every
user interface design project from the outset:
Graphic designers should be brought in at the beginning of a
project, not the end; until the rest of the team sees the designer
in action, they will not think visually. Those of us who lack the
talent to draw have long since learned to avoid coming up with ideas
that require drawing! Once having been exposed, people will start
thinking visually and will get the habit of doing quick place-holder
graphics, to be worked up and worked over by the graphic designer
later on.[16]
At the same time that there is an effort on the part of other team
members to participate actively in the visual design, graphic artists
should brush up on the cognitive psychology research that has been
done on vision, icons and recognition, symbols, and semiotics.
Next: What do artists think
Up: Art and the User
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sean dreilinger