Using Icons

When using an icon or a thumbnail to represent a link to content it is important that the images look like real world objects as closely as possible. Too often I seen menu’s that barely take this into consideration. If you think the image is not absolutely clear, adding a little text clue always helps.

I use to run a joke site years ago. The webmasters of the more popular joke sites, I believe,  were leaders in building websites. They were getting tons of traffic, and they were focused on keeping things intuitive and quick. Back then, it wasn’t all about Google ads. They had ads, but kept them limited. Here is a jokes site that knows how to use icons correctly. The icons are obvious, and to make it even more clear, they have text representation. There should be no mistake on where you are going when you click on one of their icons.

Images are not always as intuitive as you might think, and the number of people who understand them is not ten out of ten. Even looking at the screen shot the guy listening may not be the best icon. I think the rest are golden, but if you asked ten people what they thought the guy was doing do you think ten of them would say listening to jokes? I doubt it.

Back in February I wrote another article about using icons. I came across a site that I didn’t dare even mention because its use of icons was so bad. See the Article