McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
enlaso.com
enlaso.com
Navigation can make good use of icons. Left, right, up, down, start, stop, these kinds of things can be learned and used widely. Somethings like text manipulation icons, cursors, insertions, selections, can be used effectively, but can be surprisingly hard to explain or even describe. Icons for operations can be really tough. Right now as I look at my computer I can see a library of arcane and archaic imagery. Telephones, disks, pen nibs, VCR controls (navigation, sort of), little boxes with arrows, little boxes overlapping, deadbolt locks, paper airplanes, file folders, fluffy clouds, paperclips, and of course little hamburgers.
These can certainly be useful clues, but they also can be very confusing. I've seen paint brushes used to indicate a paint brush in a paint program, but I've also seen the exact same icon used to indicate a screen refresh. Now I'm at as much a loss as anyone to come up with a good substitute, although I will note that I can't imagine any _good_ circumstances when a user needs to be in charge of refreshing the screen.
These days I'm using a lot of 3D software, and the user interfaces are a crust of complicated and indecipherable icons. And that's just the top layer of the UI. Almost all of them rely on a text/label system and hot keys for doing much of the work. Discoverability is essentially zero and the only way to get good is to learn the words and the alphabet. Pros end up _hiding_ most of the UI.
Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.
The only one of the icons in the link that make much sense is the one with kcal on it. Unless I dealt, in detail, with these everyday, I'd never remember what the rest stood for. Something like this may make a lot of sense for the people that produce the labels, but I'm unconvinced it does anything good for those who need to _read_ the labels. Word labels in the intended reader's language is almost certainly the best way to go for actual use.
hell, just look at fabric instruction icons… https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a0/6b/b9/a06bb91bc...
eg. Steve jobs was an asshole, but being an asshole doesn't make you Steve Jobs, and maybe being an asshole was not a major part of what he accomplished.
People just pick what they like and try to reproduce success.
Icons are the easiest, most economical way to do internationalization. That's really the only reason we still use them at all. They were never about making life easy for the user. Some people initially thought they'd help in that respect, but they were wrong.
I'm not sure I would call them either icons or pictograms, though. Some are pictograms, but some are sort of phonetic (category radical + "sounds similar to this other character"), and most are derived in other fashions. Certainly the simplicity of icons is missing.
(But for that matter, the original topic of icons, Christian saints, is missing in all icons. The original icons didn't even express concepts, they expressed people...)
Even the arrows the OP mentions is learned association.
Likewise, words are not totally useless if you don't speak the language. I don't speak any of the above languages, but I can still make basic comments like oui/non, ja/nein, etc.
Very few people would insist these icons were good design: http://i.imgur.com/W6pWibe.png
Unlabeled icons are an antipattern in all but a handful of cases.
Not that I personally like icons. I feel I can pattern-match a word faster than I can pattern-match an icon.
Edit: spelling
Another favorite of mine is the "random hand gesture (emot)icon". The conventions for this around the world are, apparently, all over the place(!). Some places a thumbs-up means "great!", and in other places it means "I <did-bad-thing-to> your wife!". (Maybe that's a myth, though.)
> Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.
Definitely. Just to pick a few trivial examples: "solitude", "happiness", "love", "depeche mode". Alright, that last one was two words, but it was a single "token" in our common language.
EDIT: Just as a side note: This is really fascinating stuff! It's really hard to tease apart what is "cultural" (i.e. local tribe) vs. what is "hardwired" (i.e. "genetics").
The biggest problem with the save icon is that some designers have decided to use the large down arrow (which is used by browsers for download) instead of save. Thereby throughly confusing users.
It no longer represents a floppy disk but in most people's minds it is a 'save' in and of itself
It would have pissed off the French of course, but that goes in the win column. ;-)
Of course McDonalds is in an excellent position to slowly give these symbols meaning through constant exposure, but inherently the way they're designed does not convey anything at all. They might as well have just used colours or shapes.
The Korean alphabet shapes relate to the shape your mouth adopts to make the sound. Many Hanzi have structural association (even ignoring the radicals, which you could consider for the purpose of this discussion analogous to spelling)
And the meaning of the chemical symbols (e.g. "Fe" as the symbol for iron) made a lot of them easier for me to learn, though if you don't grow up with the right set of languages they are somewhat arbitrary.
And, of course, they provide employment for semioticists.
> “We realize that some of the visuals may not already be strongly linked in consumer minds to the nutrient they are meant to depict in all markets.”
> “We intend to promote understanding of the images through supporting materials in Europe, from web sites to images explained on tray liners and via in-store displays,” ...
> “After repeated exposure to these images, customers should eventually grasp their meaning, with or without printed labels next to them.”
Didn't anyone at McDonald's dare to question the basic idea of this?
Yes. It's the same amount of teaching and learning. Actually, it's probably less of both, because:
1. A fair fraction (most?) of the customers would already know some english, whereas zero know what those icons mean.
2. Knowledge of english words is valuable to anyone and is transferable to other domains. Knowledge of McDonald's icons is useless outside of McDonald's.
3. Deciphering english is a trivial peck at an online dictionary. Whatcha gonna do about an icon?
English words are creeping in everywhere anyway.
I do enjoy the irony of evading laws that require packaging in the native language, so McDonald's invents a new non-native language instead.
It sounds like McDonald's had decided the icons were the way to go before bringing in this translation company.
Better to give meaning to nonsense than to try and fight against peoples' culture.
Without the line it's like 50% more sodium relative to the number of calories I am eating. That's terrible. With the line ehh, I guess everything looks ok.
Sure the fries are over it, but the burger only 1/2 way their so that's probably ok.
A single serving that breaches the line should be treated with caution, making it straightforward to understand which foods are contributing disproportionately to your daily allowance.
I dunno...
protein: 蛋白质, fat: 脂肪, sodium: 钠, carbohydrates: 碳水化合物, energy content: 能量 (measured in kJ: 千焦)
So there is the additional problem of a. measuring different things (or using different units) and b. using different words to mean the same things.
It almost seems like they purposely don't want consumers to understand the information.
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...
In the end, it was determined that there was no guarantee that a re-established civilization could grasp what we were trying to say, and that perhaps just an area earning a reputation as cursed, via attribution of visitors, would be the best deterrent.
Therefore, I would submit: "These are not foods of honor. No highly held nutritional facts are described here. Nothing valued is here."
To extract a large amount of contaminated material and spread it around the world, you would need an advanced technological civilization, which would then be able to detect radioactivity. If anything, a big concentration of it may help accelerate their scientific progress at some point.
So ironically perhaps the best way is to make it actually radioactively poisonous so that people learn that it is a dangerous place...
For example, for proteins: the word "protein" is understandable in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek and Swedish. The Russian "belok" should be understandable to Polish and Russian speakers, and the Dutch "eiwitten" should be understandable to Dutch and German speakers. Thus, writing "protein/belok/eiwitten" would be understood by almost everyone. "kcal" is even simpler and should be understood by almost everyone everywhere - maybe make it "kcal/calories" for more readability. "salt/sol/αλάτι" should cover everybody as well. Perhaps throw in the Cyrillic as well if McDonalds expects a large amount of uneducated Russians in their restaurants.
You could even put the native language in front to prevent any insult to cultures. Am I crazy, or might this actually work?
Sure, only a relatively small percentage of the population of Germany/Poland/etc may not be able to read. But how many of those visit McDonald's? Do they visit it more or less often than other categories of people? How important is it for them to be able to understand these icons? Is the cost of developing icons/signs they also understand more or less than the amount of trouble them not understanding these icons would bring? Are we talking about actual literacy or the more nebulous category of "functional literacy"?
There are cases where "devil's advocate"-style questions are worthwhile, and I'd argue that they're worth at least considering in this case.
McDonald's plan to get people to understand them is to put the words next to the icons to get people to understand the icons, which also wouldn't help if you can't read.
I find this amusing since the first icon is "kcal"... The information is perhaps too simple, as none of these really lets me know what they mean. Without a legend, I wouldn't know what they mean, and if your icons need a legend, then they really aren't doing their job effectively.
On the other hand, is an icon set successful if you can see the label once and then keep it straight without labels in the future? I'd say so and I think this work gets close to doing that.
Consider that numbers take up relatively-constant amounts of space, but words for some nutritional concepts in some languages can be extremely long—and mostly you design for this by just requiring the design-element to have a box-size of the widest possible text in the widest language, and then padding the box with empty space almost all of the time.
Removing the words, and just having icons + numbers, allows for a design that can be very "narrow" in horizontal area, taking up a basically-constant amount of space with very little padding, allowing it to fit in many places it currently wouldn't.
Icons that are impossible to decipher don't improve anything IMHO. Perhaps they should have gone culturally-specific, something with just the first letter, or anything else that people might locally understand if the word absolutely can't be used.
Is it a problem that the "floppy disk" symbol for saving documents is now meaningless, since floppy disks are dead? Kids who encounter the icon today, just learn the meaning by rote. To them, it's an opaque language element representing a concept—just like, say, Chinese characters. Humans turn out to be okay at just absorbing the associations of an opaque icon over time, without the icon needing to be specifically evocative (skeuomorphic) of anything. It just needs to be unique.
And re: "it needs to be rethought if it should be there at all"—consider, for example, individual-serving yoghurt snack tubes. What's in them? Who knows? The info is on the box, not on the tube. Can you "count calories" on a lunch containing one? Nope, not unless you wrote down the calories from the box when you were at home. Kind of annoying, no?
They are presumably trying to establish these icons so that they will eventually become common and recognizable to many people.
That already happens routinely and organically with english words, as anyone who travels internationally knows.
Protein is the bottom of a stack -- implies important or less important depending on your personal view point on stacks Fat is a scale, implying an association with weight -- a negative link. Carbs are a gas gauge implying energy -- a positive link.
At this point, no, I don't know what the symbols mean without a legend, but I'm sure at some point in time, not everyone knew that a red octagon on a post means stop.
"language-free" by constructing...a language. They even provide a translation dictionary!
Besides, what on earth do carbs have to do with vegetables? If anything, i would expect bread to fill that role.
Grain alcohol, depending on how you prepare it, might easily retain no trace of biological material other than sugar and alcohol. That is not true of bread; bread is not heavily processed at all. You could trivially analyze any sample of bread and determine what plants it was made from.
Claiming that bread is not a plant product makes all the sense of claiming that cheese is not a milk product.
Most of the rice plant is just fiber, nutritiously.
I guess you could call honey an animal source of carbohydrates. It's not exactly a huge part of any non-hunter-gatherer's diet. And the bees have to make it from flowers.
> Some colors were changed because nutritionist feedback identified red with protein, yellow with fat and green with energy.
Red, I understand. Muscle fibre (what protein builds, in most people's minds) is red. Yellow is fat because fat is, itself—in large enough amounts—a light yellow color. Butter, margarine, liposuction ejecta... etc.
Energy, though, is a bit hard to deduce. Notice that the symbol beside carbs is a gas gauge. Petrol is, in fact, a somewhat-greenish liquid. And I'm guessing petrol was the subliminal metaphor here. You "fill up on" energy like a car fills up on gas; and carbs make you go like gas makes a car go.
Given that, it'd be redundant for the carbs icon to also be about weight. It's a meter of some sort, though. To me, it's either temperature—or pressure in a storage tank. Temperature would somewhat make sense, in the idea that carbs are the simplest thing that the body burns, and eating more carbs literally makes you hotter. But there are more common icons for temperatue (e.g. an old mercury thermometer with the teardrop base), so it's probably not temperature. Pressure it is.
Given that the referent is carbs, what would the storage tank be filled with? Probably a liquid. Liquid sugar? Sugar isn't green. What's a green liquid? Most hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are like carbohydrates, and serve many of the same functions for machines that carbs do for humans.
What's a common hydrocarbon pressure gauge? A car's gas gauge.
Fat, on the other hand, made no sense to me. And I had to go back and read the text to see if they really did intend it as "measuring tape to measure how fat you are", and yeesh, they did. That's... bad.
I could understand the point if they'd created McDonald's-specific units (e.g 10 grams of sugar = 1 McVigor). But they're just icons for info that McDonald's makes no effort to hide.
Care to elaborate?
If they allowed a greater quantity of icons that work better for each region, why wouldn't this simply be better?
> If they allowed a greater quantity of icons that work better for each region, why wouldn't this simply be better?
Economies of scale, consistent printed materials.
Rather than have 109 variants of the icons printed on 109 variants of the packaging you standardize as much of the package as you can, allows you to print larger volumes and distribute them more easily.
Alphabets solved that problem millennia ago.
Two character combinations for some of the McDonald's symbology can be kind of complicated, though:
蛋白 dànbái = protein
脂肪 zhīfáng = fat
醣類 tánglèi = carbohydrates
熱量 rèliàng = calories
Icons should be universally distinguishable/recognizable, I as a european do not see any easy distinction between the characters you just wrote, they all seem similar to my.
I am a mid-western American. The characters do look distinctive to me; but I took some Chinese in high school, many years ago -- so maybe I am not a good test case. Part of my reason for posting, was to get feedback from people with different backgrounds.
> for all I care
This is probably why you aren't running a massively successful multinational company.
They would've got very similar effect by using single letters in a circle - they're not offensive and would suggest as much to their actual meaning as a bunch of abstract icons.
Nobody claimed that.