Icons R Icons: User interface icons, metaphor and metonymy

CS-TR-02-24

Authors: Pippin Barr, James Noble, Robert Biddle, Elvis Software Design Research Group ~
Source: GZipped PostScript (633kb); Adobe PDF (667kb)


Icons are used in almost every graphical user-interface to computer software. Despite this, there is a serious lack of comprehension of what they are and how they work. The application of semiotics to user-interface icons can help to solve this problem by providing a framework for understanding icons in. This paper suggests such a semiotic approach and then applies it to real-world icons to show its effectiveness. Some hypothetical guidelines are derived from the application and a strong analytic technique results.

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