How many icons can you identify?
Imagine, for a moment, that you could not read. How many apps on your phone could you recognise simply by their icons?
What about inside applications? Take a software you frequently use, such as GIMP or MS Word, and see how many icons you can use without referring to the tooltip text.
How many individual road signs, across different regions/countries, are you familiar with?
The average Chinese (Hanzi) reader can identify between 3,000 and 4,000 individual characters. That sounds fantastical to those of us familiar with phonetic scripts such as Latin and Devanagari, but it isn't such a far fetched idea after all. Universal icons such as power, danger and stop have made the world a safer and more familiar place for everybody.
Imagine, for a moment, that you could not read. How many apps on your phone could you recognise simply by their icons?
What about inside applications? Take a software you frequently use, such as GIMP or MS Word, and see how many icons you can use without referring to the tooltip text.
How many individual road signs, across different regions/countries, are you familiar with?
The average Chinese (Hanzi) reader can identify between 3,000 and 4,000 individual characters. That sounds fantastical to those of us familiar with phonetic scripts such as Latin and Devanagari, but it isn't such a far fetched idea after all. Universal icons such as power, danger and stop have made the world a safer and more familiar place for everybody.