Tutorial 19

Designing Icons and Visual Symbols

William Horton, William Horton Consulting

Monday, May 8

Objective

Participants will learn to understand where and when to use icons, words, or both; represent conceptual and nonvisual concepts with icons; design icons for an international product; design large numbers of icons using a systematic method; draw icons and consider limitations of size and color.

Content

This tutorial teaches a systematic way to develop icons and other visual symbols. The tutorial demonstrates how designers can develop consistent sets of understandable icons by treating icons as a language and applying accepted ergonomic principles.

Audience

This introductory-level tutorial is for anyone who must design icons and visual symbols for use in computer displays, technical documents, and other media where a concept or idea must be communicated in a restricted area or to an international audience. Thus, graphic artists, user-interface designers, human factors specialists, technical writers, and product designers will benefit from this tutorial. This tutorial is also appropriate for those writing standards for icons and user interfaces.

Presentation

Lecture, exercises

Instructor

William Horton, author of The Icon Book, is a consultant specializing in applying ergonomics to communications media. A registered professional engineer, he conducts seminars on subjects ranging from online documentation to visual communication. Mr. Horton's menu and online documentation system was the first software user-interface to win the Industieform Seal of Quality, which has been awarded in recognition of excellence in design since 1953. He was also presented the Joseph T. Rigo Award for significant ongoing contributions in promoting excellence in software documentation. William Horton is also author of Designing and Writing Online Documentation, Illustrating Computer Documentation, and Secrets of User- Seductive Documents. He writes a column about multimedia for Technical Communication and is a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication.

Keith Instone / instone@acm.org / 95-01-05