drucker.ca

As I started to cus­tomize dif­fer­ent Word­Press Themes for this blog, I found myself at one point edit­ing some icons: the ones that appear next to the date () and author (). These icons are 9 by 9 pix­els, which is prob­a­bly the small­est graphic that I’ve ever edited in a UI, at least some­thing that was not con­nected to any­thing else (like the cor­ner of a win­dow or curve in a box). These icons are not really much more than a dec­o­ra­tion, and frankly, I’m some­what on the fence about them. They do draw the eye to the date and author, but I’m not sure that’s either a good thing in this case (since the author, 99% of the time will be the same) and because they do add a bit of clut­ter. Since they are so small, they are not click­able (nor should they be). Per­haps the might be use­ful as the holder of more infor­ma­tion, like the date and time. This would be infor­ma­tion that is not nec­es­sar­ily help­ful to see all the time, but in those cases where it would be help­ful to mouse over the object and get more infor­ma­tion, such a small ele­ment might be handy. In that case, mouse­able (as opposed to click­able) might not be a bad idea.

I thought that 9 by 9 might be the limit for icon size, and that this was so small that one colour (or black and white) might also be a rule. Although they are slightly larger at 16 by 16, the free set of icons from Fam­Fam­Fam called “Silk Icons” are actu­ally in colour. There are 700 of them and many of them are quite good. Let’s hope that a lot of peo­ple use them, as they pro­vide some good exam­ples of good icons on the net. I’m par­tic­u­larly impressed with and .

Nev­er­the­less, I believe that when you get below 16 by 16, an inter­face ele­ment prob­a­bly is for dis­play only. The only excep­tion might be the arrows you see on heirar­chi­cal menus, and even then it’s con­nected to a much larger item (the menu).

Update: My friend Jan has noted that these icons show up as not much more than ‘dots’ on his high-resolution lap­top screen. I for­got to take into account that as screen resoloutions go up (and more devices are minia­tur­ized), one has to take this into account. So, I’m think­ing that these days the small­est one can get in a UI ele­ment is prob­a­bly closer to the teens or near 20 pix­els for any sort of mean­ing­ful infor­ma­tion. Unless you con­sider a dot mean­ing­ful, which it is at the end­ing of a sen­tence, like this one.