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Iconography 0:48
A 48-second explainer of Iconography, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Iconography demo
What this video covers
Iconography is the use of small symbols to stand for actions or objects. The catch is that very few icons carry a single, universal meaning - most are guessed at, and guessed differently by different people - so an unlabelled icon is often a quiet little riddle rather than the instant shortcut it promises to be.
Even on a handful of common icons, the "obvious" meaning wasn't so obvious - because a heart, a star or a looping arrow mean different things in different apps, and you were guessing like everyone else. That gap between "I designed it to mean X" and "users read it as Y" is exactly why an icon usually needs a word beside it.
