Using Icons in a Menu

This morning I ran across a nice looking site that had icons in its menu. I don’t have a problem with this, unless of course, the icons have nothing to do with the content they link to. Only one of the icons they used matched the link content, the email me icon. They used a picture of an envelope. An envelope is a pretty common, and typically well understood icon for a contact page. Two of the icons really stood out to me though, and that is why I am making this post today.

What Does This Mean?

What does the icon above mean to you? I bet you don’t know. This was not the actual icon used, but is an extremely close resemblance. Would you guess home page, or maybe important stuff found here if it were flipped over? Seriously, I don’t know what that icon means, and would love your comments. According to the site I found it on, it indicated that this was a link to their about us page. I never would have guessed. The other icon I had a major problem with was their iPod icon. It was a picture of an iPod, most of us know what that is, no problem with that. The problem though, was it linked to their popular links page. Why you would have a link page as an important menu item deserving an icon, I don’t know, but that is another issue. The issue here is, why would you show an iPod to link to a page that had absolutely nothing to do with iPods?

Icons Should Be Clear

When you use an icon as a link to another page it should be clear enough that if you asked ten people what it was for, at least eight or nine would get it right. Ten would be better, but anything less is failure. What is the point of having the images if they don’t mean anything,  or worse, mean the wrong thing. Suggested menu technique, use words, not images. “Popular Links” is much more clear than an iPod icon when linking to a page with popular links.